In the Flow of Clay and Color
Ohigashi Alyne
Ohigashi Alyne works within the time-honored craft of Tobe ware, bringing her unique voice to this centuries-old medium. Combining traditional techniques with her own distinct designs and glazing styles, she turns the pristine white surfaces of Tobe porcelain into canvases for her vibrant colors and textures.
With a background in agricultural research, Ohigashi excels in botanical and natural motifs and forms. Through a combination of intuition and a deep understanding of technique and materials, she crafts ceramic sculptures and objets d’art that seek to expand the horizons and possibilities of Tobe ware as a medium.
A Fantasia of Botanical Textures
The works in Ohigashi’s Botanical Textures series are art pieces—ceramic sculptures that mark a departure from her more commercial work in tableware. Brightly colored, intricately shaped, and vividly alive, these objets d’art reside on the border between playful and serene, realistic and fantastical.
Richly textured, with a depth of glaze and detail that rewards prolonged and repeated viewing, their forms seem to subtly shift with the angle of the light and the vantage point of the viewer. Their fascination lies partly in their ambiguity. Does a piece represent a cactus, or a flower, a sea urchin, or a seed pod? Perhaps all of the above? Without one simple answer, it is up to the eye and heart of the beholder.
Nostalgic Yet New
Ohigashi’s botanical shapes and hues are influenced by her training in agricultural research, childhood boat outings on the sea, and a life spent closely observing and tending to plants. Her work is steeped in these influences. The forms of her ceramic sculptures feel half familiar and nostalgic, half mysterious and strange. It is part of what gives Ohigashi’s works their unique power.
Using local pottery stone and drawing on Tobe ware techniques, Ohigashi re-imagines the medium. Her imaginative botanical art brings to life what can be done with Tobe ware porcelain.
Biography
Ohigashi Alyne, born in 1961 in the Philippines, originally trained in agricultural science at Francis Xavier University. It was there she met her husband, a Tobe ware craftsman visiting the university as part of the Overseas Youth Cooperation Corps to provide technical guidance on pottery. Ohigashi came to Tobe in 1981, and inherited the family kiln, Ohigashi Kiln, in 1988.
She began exhibiting in 1993, and since then her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, including the Japan Contemporary Art Exhibition every year from 1996 to 2006, as well as the Asahi Contemporary Craft Exhibition. She has also received numerous awards and honors, including the Ehime Ceramics Exhibition Award (1996–1998), the 21st Century Ehime Traditional Crafts Grand Prize (2006), and the 21st Century Ehime Traditional Crafts Grand Prix Ehime Newspaper President's Award (2014), among others. Committed to local crafts, she has also acted as a member of Tobe, Ehime Prefecture, and Shikoku art associations.
