Taruta Hiroshi: Glowing Lines Carved in Celadon

Delicate beams of light that shine through porcelain like rays of sun through clouds. Ripples that seem to shift between illumination and shadow. This is linear hotarude, the signature style of Seto ware artist Taruta Hiroshi. Literally meaning “firefly technique,” hotarude involves fine cutouts carved in porcelain covered in a translucent glaze. When fired, the glaze melts over the cutouts, creating a vessel that is seamless yet allows light through, like the bright pinpricks of fireflies dancing in a silken dark night.

We visited Taruta’s studio in the historic pottery town of Seto to learn about his journey as an artist and how he makes these graceful vessels. There, we discovered a long path of experimentation, one that continues to seek out new destinations in the world of hotarude.

Taruta hadn’t planned on becoming an artist, or even a potter. Neither did ceramics run in his family; his father worked as a lacquer craftsperson making Buddhist altar fittings. Yet Taruta wasn’t pushed into inheriting the lacquerware craft, either. Rather, it was a desire to work with his hands combined with a distinct knowledge of what he did not want to do that led Taruta to pursue ceramics.

“When it came time for the high school entrance exams,” Taruta remembers, “it was a process of elimination, basically. Like, ‘I don't want to go to a general, mechanical, or commercial school.’”

He had enjoyed a ceramics experience at the local Materials Museum, now the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, plus the historic production centers of both Seto ware and Tokoname ware are near his native Nagoya. Ultimately, he chose to study in Seto.

“I didn't go to Seto Ceramics High School specifically intending to become a ceramicist at that time. But when I’d take the train home at nine or ten p.m. after high school club activities or hanging out with friends, I’d see tired salarymen. Looking back, that was huge—the feeling of ‘I don't want to become that.’” He added, “I couldn't really imagine a job where you wear a suit. In a way, that was the first turning point. I liked making things, and because I did pottery, I liked the idea of thinking for myself, making for myself, and selling things myself.”

After high school, Taruta studied for another two years in a postgraduate course at the same school before entering an apprenticeship with potter Hatano Masanori. That is where his artistic vision took shape.

“During my apprenticeship, we’d have a break at three p.m. and talk. He’d ask, ‘What do you want to make?’ or ‘What do you like?’” Then they would discuss Taruta’s interests: the white of porcelain and the pale blue of celadon; architecture and carvings. The light shining through clouds or through the crack in a door left ajar. The mysterious feel of hotarude. Other local artists were well-known for hotarude that involved pinpricks or round holes in the clay, but Hatano remarked, "I’ve never seen hotarude made with lines." That sparked Taruta to combine his interests into one, and approach the challenge of linear hotarude designs.

Beginning with short carved lines, Taruta followed a long path of experimentation, refining the glaze composition, experimenting with different carvings to create gradations of light, and thickening the lines. At first, 90 percent of pieces out of the kiln failed. But through extensive trial and error, he finally found his style.

The next turning point for Taruta was his working holiday in Germany, followed by backpacking around Europe at the age of 28. At the time, he’d been questioning whether his work was good enough, but the positive reaction he received abroad gave him confidence that he was on the right track. 

Despite not knowing German, he attended a two-week course at a German pottery school and visited artists’ studios. The differences were surprising. The potter’s wheel rotates in the opposite direction—counter-clockwise instead of clockwise. The hand positions are swapped when kneading clay. Even the use of tools is different. And though previously only interested in architectural forms, nature started to move him, as well—one past lesson from Hatano that Taruta finally understood.

“More than as an artist,” Taruta adds, “it was big for my way of thinking. Experiencing overseas culture makes you realize, it's completely different from your own country. It doesn’t operate on the common sense you’re used to. I realized my own smallness—that I had only been in this one tiny dot. It was a huge thing for my life.”

When it comes to the hotarude pieces themselves, Taruta first makes the porcelain clay body by throwing on the wheel, then trims and shaves until he achieves the basic shape he wants. With swift, deft movements, he cuts lines partway through the clay. Then, following the lines, he carves fully through the clay, not merely creating an opening in the surface, but chiseling until he arrives at delicately flowing shapes. To add movement, he carves the base of his pieces until they resemble the elegant folds of origami.

Hotarude is technically difficult. Outside Taruta’s studio is a pile of “failed” pieces: ones with holes where the glaze didn’t completely fill the carvings, or with cracks where shrinkage of the glaze and clay were in conflict during firing. Even these pieces were beautiful. My colleague was so enchanted that she got permission to bring one back with her to try filling in a pinhole using kintsugi. It goes to show that the work of an artist isn’t always linear, and even professional artists have kiln firings that don’t work out.

In fact, failure is an important part of the process, especially as Taruta experiments with new series. Taruta adjusts elements like the firing temperature to get the results he wants, but even accidents can yield unexpected beauty. Recently, one of Taruta’s pieces didn’t turn out how a customer had requested, yet the customer said, “Hey, this is good! Won’t you sell it to me?”

Experimentation and putting together design elements in different ways emphasize new aspects of the pieces as Taruta’s work continually transforms.

Taruta next introduced us to four different series of his work: Yuragi (Fluctuation), Hikari no Uzu (Whirl of Light), Hikari wo Mato (Clad in Light), and Yawaraka-na Hikari (Soft Light).

Fluctuation features long, graceful lines, drawn freehand and carved to create a gradation of thickness in the porcelain. The result is a sense of texture and a shine that is especially brilliant where the porcelain is at its thinnest.

While Fluctuation works are drawn freehand, Whirl of Light’s rhythmic swirls are measured to be evenly spaced, a form evoking the mathematical physics of a whirlpool.

Building off of both artistic ideas is the Clad in Light series, which features thicker lines positioned to suggest the gentle fall of fabric. 

Finally is Soft Light. The thick, freehand lines echo those of Clad in Light, but the rhythm is varied, long lines mingling with short, with an intentionally random placement meant to mimic the movement of soft light. Unlike the other three series, here the porcelain is rounded on both sides of the cutouts, creating a plush feel without sharp lines.

What’s striking about these pieces isn’t just their delicacy, their ethereal pale celadon, or their graceful carvings. What makes them stand out is how they interact with their environment. Each piece is a vessel that holds not just matcha or sake, but light. Each work lets light in, cups it gently, and casts it onto the outside of the piece into the shadows that sit opposite the source of illumination. Each time of day and each season thus reveals a new landscape. Rotating the vessel or moving it in relation to the light source or one’s eye level illuminates it in new ways. These are interactive, three-dimensional works of sculpture, involving both the inside and outside of each piece, the environment, and where the user places it in their space.

Taruta continues to experiment with variations on hotarude, exploring the limits of the technique. His most recent works include raindrop-like cascades of short lines and vases built up to taller and taller heights. Others pare everything back, a single carved line surrounded by the fresh breath of negative space. Yet others explore the contrast between matte white glaze and glossy celadon.

Usually, Taruta fires with a gas kiln, but a recent project involves noborigama firing. Also known as a climbing kiln, a noborigama is a kind of traditional wood-fired kiln made up of multiple chambers ascending a slope. Using noborigama, Taruta is experimenting with a technique called soda fire that results in unique color changes. Different kilns yield different finishes: pieces fired in collaboration with a team of Americans in the noborigama at Nagoya Gakuin University are delicately dusted with pink, while others fired at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum have an orange tint. In some cases, carbon that hadn’t moved up to the next level of the noborigama stuck to a piece’s surface, creating a smoky gray landscape that contrasts beautifully with the pale celadon.

Of his experience with climbing kilns, Taruta says, 

“The ancient practice of wood-firing allows you to see the flames directly. It was a valuable opportunity to reaffirm the raw power of fire and the fundamental truth that it is the flame that completes the work.”

With each new variation, further possibilities of hotarude emerge in elegantly shifting patterns of light.

One can imagine this when looking at Taruta’s designs: each developed bit by bit, with variations on a theme leading to new and ever more graceful artistic destinations. As we left his workshop and Seto behind in the rays of the setting sun, I wondered where Taruta’s beams of light would lead us next.