26.02.18
A Quiet Return
OEN started in 2007 as a place to collect what I couldn’t stop looking at — objects, architecture, and design with a quieter kind of beauty.
I was specifically interested in design as a way of seeing: Dieter Rams, Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa, Kenya Hara. Modernist architects who cared about proportion, light, and restraint. Work that didn’t shout, but stayed with you.
OEN became a gallery because I wanted those objects in my hands — not just on a screen. I began working with makers directly: ceramics, urushi, metalwork, woodwork, glass. Handmade pieces with a modern sensibility.
Somewhere inside that, something else was happening. I kept circling the same question: if I’m going to build a life around craft, shouldn’t I also learn a craft properly?
I tried a few. Ceramics was the one that held me.
So while OEN was growing, I was learning quietly — then daily — then obsessively. I bought a wheel. Then a kiln. Then I arranged my life around studio time. The longer I did it, the more I understood what I’d been searching for all those years: not just objects, but the discipline behind them. The patience. The control. The humility.
Eventually, the internet changed. Writing became a treadmill. Social platforms moved faster than I wanted to move. The gallery grew in complexity — logistics, shipping issues — and I could feel the work drifting away from the original spirit.
So I stopped. I moved to Japan. I set up a studio. I went quiet.
Now, I’m returning — but in a smaller form, and with a clearer centre.
What OEN is now
OEN is returning as a studio journal and a small gallery — a slower, more considered selection of work, including my own porcelain, and occasional collaborations with makers I deeply respect.
This won’t be the old pace of constant publishing or constant releases. I’m not interested in feeding a schedule. I’m interested in doing the work properly.
Sometimes I’ll share short field notes from the studio: a glaze result, a form decision, a lesson from a firing. Sometimes I’ll write longer essays on craft, modernism, and the way objects can bring calm into a home. And sometimes there will be small, tightly edited releases — a few pieces at a time — chosen because they genuinely belong here.
Books will return too, but in a different format: less frequent, more deliberate, and shaped around a single thread rather than trying to hold everything at once.
What I’m making
I’m working in porcelain in Kyushu, not far from the historic centres of Japanese ceramics. The aim is simple: to make everyday pieces with quiet presence — forms and surfaces shaped by the years of looking, and the years of learning.
If you’ve followed OEN for a long time: thank you. If you’ve just arrived: welcome.
I’ll share more soon — not everything, not all at once — but steadily, as the work becomes clear.
— Mark Robinson
