Artist Interview: Ohigashi Alyne’s Journey of Creation

We met Ohigashi Alyne and her stunning objets d’art of the Botanical Textures series in Part One of this article series. Now, in Part Two, we dive deeper into how Ohigashi’s life and experiences have influenced her ceramic art.

It’s an expansive story, a journey that takes us from the shores of the Philippines to the mountains of Japan. How did a trained agricultural researcher come to make traditional Japanese ceramics? And how does that inform Ohigashi’s unique artistic vision?

Although Ohigashi didn’t expect to become an artist, she has been creative since she was young. “When I was a child, my hands were always busy. I just made things, and it was my way of expression. I still use my hands to express myself.”

When Team Musubi visited her workshop, Ohigashi generously demonstrated how she creates her Botanical Textures series. Watching her fingertips carefully mold and apply small pieces of clay, I could see the cogs of her creative mind working with each movement of her hands.

“When doing ceramics,” Ohigashi adds, “you concentrate for a very long time, and it's just peaceful inside your mind.”

The quiet presence of her botanical sculptures tells that story in each line of their graceful forms.

It is Ohigashi’s childhood in the Philippines that influences many aspects of her pieces today, from the colors to the shapes she uses.

Ohigashi told us about how every Sunday after church, she and her family would go to the beach and ride in small boats. “We were able to see a lot of natural things under the sea, on the boat,” she said. “We would go very, very far out, and see the very nice colors of the ocean.”

Using those colors in her work became a major inspiration. “When you make colors,” Ohigashi explained,

“you have to have the real color in your brain. I have it in my memory. That’s valuable.”

This admiration for nature continued into Ohigashi’s adulthood. She received a university degree in agriculture and trained as a researcher in the Philippines. Her detailed knowledge of plants also makes its way into her work with shapes reminiscent of durian—a fruit familiar from her native Philippines—seed pods, flowers, and chlorophyll.

In Ohigashi’s tableware, too, plant and flower motifs are among her most popular. Forget-me-not flowers and mimosa bring bright blues and cheerful yellows and greens to the dinner table. She continues to develop new designs, including her upcoming poppy motif.

The overflowing garden attached to Ohigashi’s studio is a visual representation of her love of plants. It provides the backdrop to our conversation as we move on to how she went from the Philippines to Japan, and from agriculture to ceramics.

It was at university in the Philippines that Ohigashi met her husband, a ceramic craftsman volunteering with the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers. Ohigashi was researching how to build an entrepreneurship research group at the university and how to create a workshop about ceramics on her home island. Her husband was a ceramics consultant on the project. After his three years in the Philippines were up, they got married and she moved with him to Japan.

Ohigashi’s husband owned a Tobe ware kiln, where he made porcelain painted with traditional karakusa (arabesque) motifs, a hallmark of Tobe ware. At first, Ohigashi worked as an English teacher and assisted in her husband’s workshop, not making anything herself. But a couple of chance encounters got her interested in ceramic painting.

First was when she met a kaya-zome painter at a ceramics exhibition. A completely different style of painting than the typical Tobe ware arabesques, the painting Ohigashi saw used layers of purple and blue made by dipping kaya—a kind of Japanese fabric once used for mosquito netting—in gosu, a traditional cobalt pigment.

But kaya isn’t as common in Japan as it used to be. When Ohigashi looked for alternatives, she met a craftsperson using washi paper. “I asked her if I could have some. She was so good and kind, and she brought it from another prefecture. So that was the start,” Ohigashi said, of her journey in ceramics painting. She would later spend ten years of trial and error refining the watercolor-like technique of washi-zome, which she still uses extensively, especially in her tableware designs.

Ohigashi had only just begun exhibiting her painted designs when her husband died without warning. “It was very sudden. And there was no reason why. It was a stroke, probably. He wasn't even sick. So we were not ready for that.”

The next few years were extremely challenging.

“My husband did all the shaping of ceramic pieces. So when he died, we had trouble.” Ohigashi continued, “In Tobe, the potters are either a married couple or a factory or just a single man who works on the potter's wheel. All the husbands do the potter's wheel, like my husband, and not so many women have their own workshop. At first, I had a husband, but he died, so I was forced to become a potter. Forced. I had to do it.”

The ceramics workshop was her family’s livelihood. Ohigashi suddenly found herself having to learn the trade from the ground up, often teaching herself. She started by making simple slab-type pieces and asked neighbors for help, but the ceramics market is competitive, and not many people were willing to give up trade secrets. She even had to learn on her own how to fire a kiln.

Thinking back to that time, she said, “That was all self-taught. I had to make a lot of mistakes.”

Today, Ohigashi credits those same mistakes with helping her to achieve as much as she has. She adds of her creative growth, “Even now, I'm still experimenting with many things because nobody will teach you.”

These days, it is herself rather than anyone else that Ohigashi competes with. “I level up with myself. Because I think I can always do better.” Ohigashi is excited to pass on both the traditional techniques she’s learned and her unique ways of doing things to her children and grandchildren. The use of gosu, hand painting, and washi-zome are all part of what she wants to pass on, as well as her artistic mindset.

“Craftspeople are very precise, and have to repeat things perfectly,” according to Ohigashi, while artists are “more free.” While the process of an artist is precise, each piece is different. 

“If I get a successful artistic process and put it into data, other people or the next generation can use it. Then there will be more artists here in Tobe.”

It’s a wonderful dream for her second homeland.

The sun was long in the sky as we left Ohigashi’s workshop and studio behind us. Our visit had prompted reflection on the artistic process and the leaps it takes to try something so new and unique as Ohigashi’s Botanical Textures series. Not unlike moving to a new country, exploring new frontiers of a medium and art form can feel vulnerable and strange, but that makes both all the more worthwhile.