Using Ancient Kilns En Iwamura Builds His Ceramics One Coil At a Time
As a child, En Iwamura visited Shigaraki, one of Japan’s famed centers for pottery and the home of tanuki (raccoon dog) sculptures. Though, back then Iwamura didn’t have ceramic ambitions. “I never imagined being a ceramic artist when I was a kid,” Iwamura admits. “I had no interest.” But today, he is a ceramicist living and working in Shigaraki—a small town east of Kyoto and home to one of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns. In a place with a deep history of ceramics—Shigaraki is one of the oldest pottery centers in the country—Iwamura uses traditional techniques, like coil building, to create imaginative figures that resonate with contemporary audiences.
He rolls and winds clay, reshaping it in a process that he describes as a form of doodling, without knowing where the material will lead him. “Until the last minute, I have no idea what it’s going to be,” Iwamura explains. “The clay is super soft so I can push or pull when it’s soft. I can change the shape whenever.” The end result might be a head so large, yet so fragile, that he must enlist friends to help move it by forklift. Or he might produce a series of smaller pieces, like a recent one that resembles anthropomorphic mountains and appeared at his 2024 solo exhibition with Ross + Kramer Gallery in Miami.
With clay, Iwamura crafts fine art that is a reflection of studying ceramics in both Japan and the United States. It was happenstance that brought the artist to his medium of choice. As a student, he applied to study painting, but wasn’t accepted. “Somehow, I got into the craft major,” he says.
While studying craft, Iwamura could work with a variety of different materials, but he was drawn to clay for multiple reasons. “I couldn’t speak English, but through ceramics, I could communicate with many people living in different parts of earth,” he explains. “I felt like ceramics could be an international language itself.”
I COULD MAKE, SHAPE WITH ONLY MY HANDS. WE DON’T NEED TO USE ANY TOOLS…“I THOUGHT I COULD MAKE WHATEVER I WANT TO MAKE.”
Plus, he adds, there’s the physicality of working with clay. “I could make, shape with only my hands. We don’t need to use any tools,” he says. With clay, he could “doodle” in 3-D too. “I thought I could make whatever I want to make.”
After earning his bachelor’s degree and first master’s degree in Japan, Iwamura studied in the United States.
Initially, Iwamura knew that he wanted to study abroad, but wasn’t sure where. Then, he met Jun Kaneko, the Japanese–American ceramist. “I was shocked by his scale as an artist. I had never seen such a great studio and great artist before and I asked him, I want to work for you,” Iwamura recalls. “He told me, I couldn’t hire you because you’re international, but if you became a student again, you could get a five-year visa, so, whenever, you can visit me.”
Iwamura was recruited for the MFA program at Clemson University in South Carolina and headed to the United States. Ultimately, he was only able to visit Kaneko, who is based in Nebraska, a couple times, but Iwamura still had an eye-opening experience.
“I couldn’t speak English and suddenly I was left in the middle of nowhere in South Carolina,” he says. “So, different culture, different people—and no Japanese over there. It was challenging. But I had nothing to lose. I had to try.”
The experience gave him a very different perspective for working in ceramics. “My major was craft when I was in Japan, so I could learn ceramics from a craft understanding—how to use, or the history behind, or what kind of materials or chemistry behind it or tradition behind it,” he explains.
“But after I came to the U.S. I learned clay, ceramics, in the fine art major,” he continues. “Then my professor told me, your work is interesting and you already have content in your work. You have to find why you make your work.”
I WANT TO SHOW THE POSSIBILITY
OF THIS KIND OF CREATIVE CITY.”
In Japan, Iwamura says, craft students relate to the concept of mingei. “People think the great Japanese craft was made by unknown artists. It’s not artists, it’s more like craftsmen,” he says. “So, a craft piece: there’s no need to mention who made it or something like that.”
In contrast to the anonymity associated with ceramics in Japan, people in the U.S. wanted to know who Iwamura was via his art. “So then I started to think about where I came from and what I learned and what I encountered and why I was in the U.S.,” he says. “That was kind of a story that I simply collected about why I wanted to make work.”
Iwamura’s process reflects the deep, cross-cultural history of ceramics. Coil-building, the method he relies upon to make his sculptures, is an ancient technique used in various parts of the world. “People were rolling coils to build pots” thousands of years ago, Iwamura explains. “I’m still doing the same thing. It’s traditional.”
But Iwamura’s finished pieces are far less tradition in appearance. He sculpts heads with the kind of sweet, simple faces that you might see on children’s toys or in comic strips. He sometimes makes full, rounded figures that can resemble snowmen or ghosts. Other pieces appear to take their cues from nature, looking like mountains or clouds. Using layers of paint in different colors before the glazing process, Iwamura creates an effect where the hue can appear to change depending on the viewer’s vantage point.
The varied textures of Iwamura’s pieces are also representative of global traditions. The lines, which he adds after sculpting the shapes, reference everything from Jomon pots to African masks to Mexican crafts.
Particularly when he’s creating installations, Iwamura plays with the Japanese concept of Ma, which he describes as the “negative space” that exists between things. “Things means not only existing object, but such as time, space, and relation ship between audience and object itself,” he explains in follow-up correspondence.
After close to six years in the U.S., plus residencies in China and France, Iwamura returned to Japan. Between 2019 and 2020, he was a resident artist at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park. Now he works out of a former gift shop in the area, which he has turned into a studio. Iwamura says that, since the birth of his first child last year, he spends about three days a week in the studio.
It’s his son who has inspired a recent series of works. Iwamura has been making stacked sculptures where “random” heads are placed on bodies. The components vary in shape and detail. A body might resemble a podium or a bock with soft corners. The heads possess different, quirky facial features, like bulging eyes or a triangular nose. The pieces are stacked one atop the other in unexpected shape and color combinations, like a tall, orange head placed on a small, bowl-shaped, baby blue body.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with him and he has lots of toys. All the kids’ toys are colorful,” says Iwamura of the influence his year-old son has had on this series. “He’ll put the cup on the animal or something. It’s different toys, but the color combinations are beautiful and I can find a nice balance.”
Because of Shigaraki’s historic connection to ceramics, there are still local professionals that Iwamura can rely
upon when he needs assistance. “We have professional shippers and packers, local people, so they can come to my studio,” he says, mentioning one local who stops by his studio to check in on what Iwamura needs to have shipped. A local company also mixes the glaze that Iwamura formulated for his pieces.
I FELT LIKE CERAMICS COULD BE AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE ITSELF.”
Yet a decline in the ceramics industry has impacted Shigaraki. “There were a lot of active factories and people who were working on ceramics. There were more factories. That were very active,” Iwamura explains. “Nowadays no one wants to continue the business.”
It’s more than companies that make ceramics that have closed, he adds. Clay-related businesses are impacted as well. Iwamura says this is a “critical” issue, which is why he wants to encourage younger folks—and not just artists—to become a part of Shigaraki. “My future goal is that I want to see a newer version of the Shigaraki creators community happening,” he notes.
Iwamura acknowledges that bringing more people to Shigaraki is a difficult task. “I want to do what I can do,” he says. One thing he says that he can do is raise his own profile as an artist as a means of bringing more attention to the community. “I want to be one of some examples of independent artists,” he says. “For the future, I want to see more younger people to come to do better than me in Shigaraki.”
He also tries to keep his studio as accessible as possible. “Of course, I’m working by myself. I can’t meet all the people who come to my studio,” says Iwamura. “If I have time and we have opportunity, I try to be as open as possible. I try to have guests as much as possible.”
When Iwamura was a child visiting Shigaraki, he says, he never imagined that one day he would have a studio there. Now he’s not only making ceramics in the town—he’s building and shaping a community by encouraging others to do the same. He says, “I want to show the possibility of this kind of creative city.”*
This article was recently published as the cover feature in Hi-fructose issue 71. Get the full issue in print here.
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