For the past three months, ceramicist Simone Bodmer-Turner has been a pupil of ancient Japanese craftsmanship. She’s been living and working at the Shiro Oni artist-in-residency studio in Fujioka, a far cry from her home bases in New York and Massachusetts. “The opportunity to participate in such a storied, almost ritualistic process in a place so steeped in the tradition of pottery is what drew me here,” Bodmer-Turner says. “I had originally applied to work here during this current session, which is organized around an anagama kiln firing at the end of October.” As she explains, anagama kilns are the oldest kilns in the world. These large brick ovens dating back to the 5th century require that the craftspeople actually crawl inside of them to load, then they spend four days refueling the fire and monitoring them all day and through the night. Once the pieces are removed from the kilns, they must cool for an entire week.
The kilns are located deep in the woods of the mountainous area surrounding Shiro Oni, through which Bodmer-Turner and other visitors to the studio hiked with the program’s director, Kjell Hahn. The group stayed in a cabin during the firing process, enjoying outdoor meals together and participating in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony led by Hahn’s partner and artistic collaborator, Fuyuko Kobori. In the end, Bodmer-Turner not only honed her own craft, but went home with a completely new perspective on the art of pottery making. “The sleepy town and the kiln firing is a very real portrait of Japan that most people have never seen,” she says. Above, she lets us in on the beautiful little secrets.