KAORI TATEBAYASHI is a Japanese ceramicist who creates sculptural ceramic installations of meticulous detail inspired by nature. Through her devoted knowledge of her medium and her disciplined study of the natural objects in front of her, Tatebayashi seeks to capture specific moments in time. Tatebayashi only works from life, never from memory or photographs, and works only with her hands and a single knife she herself has made. This intimate knowledge of her subjects, and her intimacy with her medium, lends to the creation of bisque pieces that are exquisite in both their assiduous precision and in their stoic truthfulness as index of a particular point of time.
Kaori Tatebayashi grew in Arita, Japan, the home of traditional Imari porcelain, to a family of ceramics traders and saw ceramics first and foremost as functional tableware for use every day. While studying ceramics in Kyoto and London, earning an M.A. in ceramics from Kyoto City University of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art, she explored the less utilitarian possibilities of clay, as both an agent of beauty and documentation. She examined, and continues to examine, the paradoxical nature of ceramics as both impermanent and enduring. Harnessing the contradictions of her ceramics’ nature, Tatebayashi aims to not only to provide a testimonial of what once was, but to preserve time with her intricately beautiful, spectral forms. Today, living and working in South London, Tatebayashi sees her work as a metaphor for memory; they are traces of the past, an anomalous connection between the past and the present.