Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay — Cup — Kodai Ujiie
Kodai Ujiie
Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay · Sculptural ceramic, stoneware with layered glazes
Reference JPN-CLR-003
About the work
This cup belongs to Kodai Ujiie's Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay, where clay behaves less like a passive material than a shifting geological surface. At the compact scale of a cup, fractured, compressed stoneware carries the same layered glaze and material tension that runs through the wider group, evoking rock and mineral deposit rather than conventional tableware.
Detail
This cup is part of Kodai Ujiie's Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay, a body of sculptural ceramics that treats the vessel as a record of physical transformation rather than a purely functional object. At cup scale, that idea is concentrated rather than diminished: a hand-built stoneware body, compressed and fractured, carries layered glaze that pools and flows across its surface like a second, liquid geology. Cracks and raised fragments read as evidence of pressure and accumulation, echoing processes that normally unfold at a geological scale — erosion, sedimentation, mineral deposit — compressed here into an object small enough to hold. The cup retains an echo of its conventional function while function itself becomes secondary to mass, surface and material tension, so that even a small drinking vessel carries the series' central image of clay as memory, and the ceramic surface as a fragment of imagined terrain.
About the series
Across the collection, clay is treated as something capable of recording force — compression, rupture, accumulation, heat and flow — so that even a functional form like a cup becomes a temporary structure exposed to change rather than a fixed geometric object.
