Cups, Pots and Bowls by Ryoma Matsubara

Some beautiful cups, pots and bowls that I found whilst browsing a favourite around here, kurasukoto.com in Japan. They’ve always got an interesting selection of ceramics, textiles and cutlery, so as you can imagine I’m constantly looking that way for inspiration and they rarely disappoint, this time bringing over a range of imagery by creative Ryoma Matsubara.

Ryoma was born in the Oita prefecture in 1975 and now works full time making his items, what’s interesting about these is that you can’t tell whether they’re ceramic or iron, it’s very deceiving. Through searching online Mr Matsubara doesn’t seem to have much of a presence apart from being stocked in a few stores, and they don’t offer much insight in to his background, so I’ve had to make some of my own assumptions on these wonderful looking pieces. And they look damn robust and functional as well!

As far as I’m concerned these are all in the pottery category because I did read that he had built a kiln to fire these, so that would make sense, where as ironware is a different process altogether. My only doubt is that a few are under iron pots which could mean that he’s experimented with iron and has used a similar effect as you would with ceramics to glaze the pieces, which would be totally new and different in itself. Either way you’re probably going to have to make your own mind up but aesthetically I think they’re really clean and they’ve got some quirky features, for example the form is often uneven and quite unusual. There’s no attempt to make them perfectly symmetrical and I think this is a nice touch, manufacturing today is too precise in my opinion and is very boring and dull, this is certainly not. Also, the effect glazed on top is great as it shows the surface underneath in quite a weird and wonderful way, all breaking up like metal is appearing from below.

If you haven’t checked out the Kurasukoto webshop you’d be pretty insane not to, the imagery is on another level and really conveys these pieces in the best way possible. You instantly fall in love with a lot of the stuff in the shop, it’s hard not to when some of them have been snapped on grainy 35mm film.

www.kurasukoto.com

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