Konno Tomoko Japanese, 1967

Konno Tomoko graduated from a program in fashion design before going to live in Hong Kong, where she encountered ceramics for the first time; she eventually moved back to Tokoname in Aichi Prefecture for twelve years of intensive work in clay. From 2012 to 2015 she lived and worked in Bali, where she found that her creativity resonated in unexpected ways with the island’s spirit and natural environment: “I felt as though I’d been called to this place!”

For more than a decade Konno has made organic, otherworldly forms out of myriad components of marbleized, multicolored porcelain clay, worked by hand into masses of slender, tightly packed follicles; tiers of tiny seed-like cells that build into strange protuberances; or larger sheets that resemble the leaves of an insectivorous plant —or perhaps the legs of some giant spider. If her sculptures had a sound, “it would not be balmy or refreshing, like the wind or the rustling of leaves, and would be caused not by big movements but by tiny, delicate oscillations.”

Anticipating the kind of work produced by some of the youngest ceramists in this volume, Konno has created a world that is ambiguous both in its minute details and its overall forms: colorful and grotesque, inspiring conflicting feelings of aesthetic delight and existential dread.

By Joel Earle, Senior Consultant for Japanese Art at Bonhams