I could never find the pottery I liked, so I learned how to make it myself and now I get to share it with everyone!
I make Utilitarian Art: art that stands out before a wall of fine paintings, then serves your tuna casserole for dinner. To this end, nearly everything I make – be it for use with food or not – is food safe and lead free. Most of my pottery is also dishwasher and microwave safe.
I want my ceramic vocabulary to express the poetry of the earth. Silent stones rise to thrust massive mountains to the sky. A gentle waft from a dragonfly’s wing transforms into a cyclone of fury over the land. A tranquil stream meanders through forest thickets then cascades into vast, mysterious seas. And the great sentinel redwoods rise in tribute to heaven, guiding the circle of life fleeting across the globe.
My bowls and mugs stand in a row of perfect imperfection. Like a grove of bamboo, they are similar, yet different. My favorite green glaze whispers of the moss covered stones sleeping in the quiet forest streams of my grandmother’s song so many years past when I was yet a small child. And every so often I must unleash the secret storm in my soul as a swirl of sculptural flowers or an eruption of uncanny creatures.
I want my pottery to rise from the wheel like bamboo rising from the forest floor. I often feel that bamboo is my spirit animal: slender and lithe yet strong and supporting.
As a child, I would gaze out my bedroom window at the clump that grew there. Its soft rustle in the spring breeze called to wake me in the morning. Its stalks and leaves were a shield against the summer sun and the winter chill. It is hardly surprising that I want to include it in my work – a marriage of plant and stone; of soft and hard; of the living and the inert. The elements of the earth combined.
As a tiny studio pottery, Mud and Rocks Pottery only sells handmade ceramic ware created by me: Ken Takara.
Unlike the inexpensive, mass-produced, and relentlessly identical imports at your discount store, my pots are all individually handmade, unique, and (hopefully) priced reasonably.
• I throw each pot on the potter’s wheel – one at a time – so that it bears the mark of my hands, tools, and mood of that day.
• I carve, model, paint, and decorate my work freehand. This is quite inefficient (and a major liability in mass production), but it imbues each piece with its own, unique personality. (I don’t do mass production).
• My gas kiln is a miniature volcano, articulating its passion as a fiery conflagration that melts and fuses the clay and minerals, transforming them into the glazed and finished pots that you can pick up, hold, and use.
Because every ceramic item sold by Mud and Rocks Pottery is individually handmade, it’s photographed appearance and specified dimensions are necessarily approximate.
