[gentle music]
- Ayumi Horie: This is our RAM press machine.
It's a hydraulic press
that basically is a giant clay squisher.
You put a billet of clay in,
the platform rides up, and there's a mold
for the inside of the pot and the outside of the pot.
[machine whirring]
The aspect of function has always been critical to me.
I almost don't know, like, why you'd wanna
make something that wasn't functional.
Pots exist in, for the most part, in the domestic sphere.
In these very intimate spaces.
When you hold a handle, you're like,
you're hugging somebody,
you're holding hands with somebody.
When you bring a cup to your lips, like,
it's this, like, very intimate act.
[gentle music]
And so, I think my ceramic work really addresses the inner self.
You know, how I wanna be in the world.
[gentle music]
I grew up in a little bubble of Japanese culture
in a very white state.
And I think I've spent a lot of my career
trying to explore how that has impacted me.
You know, what is embedded in me?
[hand thumping]
When I was an undergrad,
I developed a really terrible case of tendonitis.
So I developed a technique called dry throwing.
Most of us are familiar with wet throwing,
where you use plenty of water
to pull up the wall of a cylinder.
Dry throwing is like coring out the inside
and pushing out the walls.
It's a reductive process, but it gives you
a different kind of sensibility than wet throwing.
For me, I like the kind of raw quality of it.
I got a BA and then I got interested in ceramics.
And when I decided I wanted to be a potter,
I went back to school.
And I studied at the University of Washington
with Akio Takamori.
When I got out of school, I looked at the internet,
which was really on the rise,
and seemed like a really natural channel
in which to put my energies.
Like, you didn't need to find somebody that lived
10 miles away that was interested
in your quirky little raccoon cup.
That person could be in Seattle, or Montreal, or in Florida.
I think my aim for really my whole career
has been to broaden the audience for handmade pots.
In the beginning, I really concentrated
on trying to use photography to capture process.
When they started allowing video,
it really changed the game.
The tactility of clay.
The plasticity of it.
Its just, like, squishiness.
It felt just like making more potent
the message I was trying to get across.
I had a project called Pots in Action.
I was asking people to take pictures
of my work in their lives,
to complete that circle between user and maker.
Pots in Action became another form of education
to share, like, all the amazing things about ceramics.
And so I feel like I've been able to make
this kind of quirky line of work
like, really because of the internet.
[gentle music]
These are water slide decals.
They're drawings that I actually made in clay.
So they're basically silk screened with glazes.
It works just like a temporary tattoo.
So the trick is really to get the water
and any air bubbles out from underneath the decal,
so the adhesion to the surface of the glaze is strong.
A lot of times, I make work for kids.
I'm drawing alphabets.
I'm drawing multiplication tables.
I like the idea that there's a didactic object
that's, like, not a book.
For a kid to learn off a piece of pottery or a tenugui,
these Japanese hand towels,
I really love that idea where, like,
that learning is embedded into life.
- Chloe: Okay. - Ayumi: Can I hold the baby?
- Chloe: Yeah, do you wanna put her hat on?
- Ayumi: We're living here in this liberal bubble,
and we don't really think all that much
about being gay parents.
But for a long time, I heard the same message,
and I believed it.
You know, that being a mother really, like,
shut down your career and you couldn't do both.
I mean, that's a kind of mythology
that needs to be dismantled.
So many famous male artists
had their domestic lives taken care of by their wives.
The reality is, is like,
none of us have done any of this alone.
And some of us have had more privileges than other people.
Craft, I think, has been inaccessible
for a number of reasons.
You know, whether it's economic or,
that they've been predominantly white spaces,
with the kind of inequitable systems
that were set up in the first place.
[potter's wheel humming] I'm not particularly interested
in addressing politics through my ceramic work.
So for me, working to try to help change culture
through policy and protocol, those are the ways in which
I feel like I can have an impact.
- Marilyn Zapf: The Center for Craft just launched
the Craft Archive Fellowship,
and we worked on that with Ayumi and a number of other folks.
Each fellow is gonna research in an archive underrepresented
or non-dominant craft histories.
- You know, I came to you with a seed of a dream,
and I feel like you made the whole thing a reality.
- If we can acknowledge that expertise
comes from so many different sources,
I think we can begin to tell more of those histories
and then value more of those experiences.
- Yeah, you know, archives are made up
of what somebody thought was important at the time.
- Yeah. - And so how do we start
to rethink archives so that we can start to celebrate
and reexamine the things
that we have not questioned in the past?
- My hope is that makers will see themselves
as part of craft and where and how
to take us forward into a brighter future.
- Ayumi: It's interesting when you think about, you know,
how each of us as artists defines success.
Does it mean showing at the Venice Biennale?
Does it mean being in this museum collection
or in that gallery?
I feel like, and maybe it's such a low bar,
but I feel like it's such a kind of simple bar,
but like, making a cup that functions well,
that migrates to the front of the cupboard,
that is dear to somebody,
to me, is like, one model of success.
[bright music]
I'm trying to make something that will be a positive force
in the world.
And so I think that's what keeps me going.
[bright music]