Shell Series — Cup — Shinya Tanoue
Shinya Tanoue
Shell Series · Stoneware, slip and blue glaze
Reference JPN-BLU-005
About the work
In Shinya Tanoue's Shell Series, this cup translates a protective, shell-like form into a small functional vessel. A tightly incised exterior gives way to an interior finished in deep blue glaze, so the same tension between enclosure and opening that runs through the wider series plays out at the intimate scale of a drinking vessel.
Detail
This cup belongs to Shinya Tanoue's Shell Series, in which the artist reworks the shell — as egg, seashell or seed husk — into a sculptural vocabulary for hand-built stoneware. At cup scale, that vocabulary becomes explicitly functional: a compact vessel whose exterior carries the series' characteristic dense, restrained incised surface, worked through repeated carved and scraped lines. Turned to reveal the interior, the form opens into the luminous blue glaze that distinguishes the series throughout, its saturated colour set against the matte, textured skin outside. Where larger sculptural vessels in the series can read as pure form, this smaller, functional piece keeps the shell's logic of protection and opening legible at the scale of use — held in the hand, its enclosed exterior and glazed interior remain in the same close conversation between stillness and emergence that defines Tanoue's wider practice.
About the series
Tanoue treats the shell as a structure that protects while preparing for what comes next — for a piece built at cup scale, that idea plays out in the direct contact between hand and vessel, exterior skin and glazed interior.
