Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay — Plate — Kodai Ujiie
Kodai Ujiie
Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay · Sculptural ceramic, stoneware with layered glazes
Reference JPN-CLR-009
About the work
This plate from Kodai Ujiie's Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay reworks a familiar flat form into fractured terrain: a compressed, cracked stoneware surface carries pooling layered glaze, so the plate reads closer to an eroded landscape fragment than conventional tableware.
Detail
As a plate within Kodai Ujiie's Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay, this work takes one of ceramics' most familiar, flattest forms and exposes it to the same pressures that run through the wider collection. Rather than a stable, symmetrical disc, the surface is compressed and fractured, its structure closer to cracked earth or eroded rock than to conventional tableware — an object that retains an echo of its plate form while pushing decisively toward sculpture. Layered glaze pools and gathers across the disrupted surface, moving like a second, liquid geology over the fractured clay body beneath it, and every depression or raised fragment stands as evidence of the compression and accumulation Kodai Ujiie builds the series around. Set flat and open, a plate exposes more of that worked surface at once than a closed vessel would, so the collection's central tension — between an intimate, handmade object and the immense scale of an imagined landscape — reads with particular clarity here.
About the series
Cracks across the collection suggest dried earth, layered surfaces recall geological strata, and glaze accumulations resemble mineral pools or liquid moving through fractured stone — laid flat, a plate exposes that geological reading of the surface especially directly.
