Spring Snow — Tall Form — Satoru Hoshino
Satoru Hoshino
Spring Snow
Reference JPN-CND-003
About the work
Satoru Hoshino's Spring Snow transforms the memory of melting snow into an intensely tactile ceramic form. Built up through repeated hand pressure, this tall stoneware sculpture rises from an exposed earthen base into dense fields of deep blue and white glaze that pool and drip across its irregular surface.
Detail
Satoru Hoshino's Spring Snow series began with a direct observation: snow melting under the late-winter sun, echoed by Hoshino in a parallel ceramic process, where clay hardens permanently under heat while glaze itself melts, flows and solidifies again. In this tall, hand-built stoneware sculpture, that transformation is physically visible. A narrow, terracotta-coloured base gives way to a dense, repeatedly folded and hand-pressed upper structure, where deep blue and near-black glaze settle into recesses while thick white glaze drips across raised ridges toward the exposed clay below — a relationship of colour that recalls snow settling over darker ground without ever becoming a literal landscape. The sculpture records two kinds of movement at once: the movement of Hoshino's hands through soft clay, and the movement of glaze through fire, both arrested permanently once the kiln cools. Part of his wider Spring Snow practice, the piece treats stoneware and glaze as two connected materials caught mid-transformation rather than a fixed, finished vessel.
About the series
The work's central concept is transformation through melting — for Hoshino, melting snow and melting glaze are connected through the same physical process, and the sculpture captures the unstable moment between solid and liquid states, appearing to grow, melt, collapse and solidify at once.
