Natsumi Noda talks about the process of creating her artwork: "Communication with people at the dining place is the starting point of my work."

How did you start making ceramics?

- First of all, we would like to know when you started working with ceramics.

I chose a high school where I could major in ceramics. It was a selective comprehensive high school, so some students majored in painting, others in industrial production, and I chose ceramics.
For my graduation project, I had to create a piece of artwork. I created a piece of pottery by exemple. I think this was the beginning of my attempt to create my own artwork.

- Have you been interested in ceramics since childhood?

-　So you entered the Tohoku University of Art & Design, where you studied ceramics for four years.

Yes, I did. In the first three years, I learned everything in one way or another; in three years, I learned specialized and wide-ranging things like glaze preparation, clay pot preparation, and plaster mold preparation, and then suddenly in the fourth year, "What do you want to do?" so I had to find my own style in between the three years of basic classes, and I was so busy that I couldn't even get a part-time job. 
But even though I couldn't get a part-time job, food was very abundant.
There was a university in the middle of the mountain, but when I walked around, there were many rice fields and farms. An old man in a light truck suddenly asked me to give him my hand, and when I pointed out my hand, he suddenly put cherries in my hand and went away.
The university also has a farm, where we harvest vegetables, and in the spring we get bamboo shoots from the bamboo thickets on the property. 
Perhaps it is because of the local characteristics, but some of the staff at the university's facilities are hunters, and they share the meat of pheasants with us, and we have pheasant stew in a pot we have made ourselves.
One class were impressive. The first week, the whole craft course was put on a bus to a farm to sketch sheep. The next week, we sheared sheep wool and twisted it with a thread winder. Next, we made tools for cooking meat with a forge, next, tools for cooking rice with ceramics, tools for eating, spoons and chopsticks made of wood, which were processed with Japanese lacquer and decorated with gold and silver lacquer, and finally, we cooked and ate mutton.
The intention was to think about the usability of using things we made ourselves, and the mutton and vegetable dish  was very tasty.

- It is truly like a cycle, the workings of nature and man.

- How did you start working as an artist after that?

When I was a senior, I entered a Japan Craft Exhibition and won an Encouragement Award.
One of my university professors said to me, "Once you win an award, that's when you become an artist." I was aware that I was an artist with those words.

- You returned to Tokyo after that, didn't you?

 

 

” Since childhood, I have been very familiar with the idea of making things with my hands. ”

 

 The work that became the basis for the brand under the name Natsumi Noda was created in a class I took in my third year of university, in which we had a tea party with a local Japanese confectionery shop. The class was to create confectionery and tea utensils to be used at the tea party.
The professor told us that we would not be able to create freely at first, so he suggested that we try to do a mokoku (a three-dimensional version of a reproduction).
We would choose a work we were interested in and just look at the pictures, and we would approach the work itself without researching the technique.
Each of us would create our own original technique, or rather, we would reproduce it in our own way. 
I selected a piece of Mexican folk art pottery from the 1930s called Tonala Pottery, which is made in the Tonala region of Mexico. I really liked a plate I saw in a book that had a collection of pieces that were more artist-oriented. 
As I was recreating it, it turned out surprisingly well and was a lot of fun to make. My teacher told me that this method of production was suited to me.

The pieces I was making secretly in between basic classes when I was a student were similar to the designs for the current "Imustan" brand. So I feel that both were parallel.
The Noda Natsumi line was inspired by the Mexican pottery I mentioned earlier, and the Imustan line was inspired by a suggestion from a gallery in Miyagi Prefecture that I was first involved with to create a separate line of mugs. 
Around that time, I had a chance to talk with Ms. Nemoto of SANZOKU, and she advised me to try two lines to make it easier for customers to understand, since they would be confused.

→Next time: Natsumi Noda, who "adds stories, emotions, impressions of being there, and a sense of temperature," explains the concept and motifs of her work.