Sake cup (guinomi) 2011

This sake cup was made by Imaizumi Takeshi, a Japanese artist born in 1978. I'm always interested in what an artist decides to keep and what they decide to discard. This little vessel has a beautiful and austere presence, like a dark star with a matte surface, as if the artist took it out of a supernova. I can imagine Takeshi-san’s focused gaze, a steady hand coaxing the clay, negotiating this balance between roughness and refinement. The eye travels the facets of the cup’s interior, the ridges creating subtle play of light and shadow, as if to say, this is how I think about space. It's easy to imagine the artist at work, a quiet dialogue between intuition and the materiality of clay. This cup exists in a lineage of functional objects transformed into works of art.