Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay — Kodai Ujiie
Kodai Ujiie
Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay · Sculptural ceramic, stoneware with layered glazes
Reference JPN-CLR-007
About the work
Part of Kodai Ujiie's Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay, this sculptural ceramic work treats clay as a form of memory — every depression, rupture and raised fragment preserving evidence of pressure and transformation, while layered glaze flows across the surface like a second, liquid geology.
Detail
This work belongs to Kodai Ujiie's Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay, a collection that approaches ceramics as a record of physical transformation rather than a fixed, symmetrical object. Rather than resolving into a stable vessel shape, the clay is allowed to become unstable, compressed, fractured and visually exposed — forms that retain an echo of bowls, containers and vessels are pushed toward sculpture, where function becomes secondary to mass, surface and material tension. The surfaces evoke processes that normally unfold on a geological scale: erosion, sedimentation, cracked earth, mineral accumulation, tectonic pressure, as if the object had been shaped by forces larger than the hand that made it. Clay becomes a form of memory here, with every depression and raised fragment preserving evidence of that pressure, while layers of glaze move across the surface like a second, liquid geology laid over stone. The result sits between vessel and landscape, read simultaneously as a constructed object and a fragment of imagined terrain.
About the series
The central idea of the collection is transformation through material pressure: clay is treated as something capable of recording compression, rupture, accumulation, heat and flow, so the vessel becomes a temporary structure exposed to change rather than a fixed geometric form.
