The Brooklyn Rail

At ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu’s home and studio in Quakertown, New Jersey—near Princeton University, where she taught for twenty-five years—she would often place her vessels directly outside, in the dirt and vegetation, radiating outward from the kiln. Takaezu’s apprentices would join her to cook or tend to her garden, which she considered as central to her practice as working in her studio. “I am teaching you to see the world with bigger eyes,” she would repeat to her students.

Worlds Within, now on display at the Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, is the most comprehensive retrospective of Toshiko Takaezu’s (1922–2011) work to date. Paintings and textiles by Takaezu are displayed alongside decades of her ceramic works, which span early experiments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, multi-spouted pots, plates, and the closed forms for which she is best known. These range in size from Closed Form (1972), which is glazed in oil-slick iridescence and could fit in your palm, to five human-scale works from her “Star Series.” Most of the objects are displayed without plexiglass cover, allowing for close looking and the opportunity to view them in the round. Throughout the show, interdependence serves as a curatorial principal and a display strategy: vessels are shown on low plinths atop Takaezu’s own weavings, and situated in volcanic sand, or surrounded by gray stone. Her largest forms are displayed free-standing; circumambulating them, we mimic the route Takaezu would have followed as she painted glaze onto the works, a movement she described as akin to dancing.

Two large spheres, one cream, one black, hang adjacent to the “Star Series” works, suspended in woven hammocks. Gaea (1979–ongoing) is an iterative, ongoing series of installments of Takaezu’s ceramic moons hung in hammocks. The hammocks began as a practical consideration—they provided a way to dry the moons while maintaining their shape. The moons, which she began to make in the 1960s, were created through joining two thrown bowls after they had dried leather-hard. The seams between the two forms remain visible and are often exaggerated, their shape made intentionally imperfect and asymmetric by Takaezu. 

Across the exhibition, ten additional moons are displayed on the floor, resting in volcanic sand. Above them hangs Heart (1975) a large textile of natural linen woven by the artist Lenore Tawney (1907–2007), who was Takaezu’s close friend. Takaezu and Tawney had a shared project of expanding their respective mediums: Tawney in her woven forms, which she treated as sculptures to be viewed from all sides, hanging them freely, detached from the wall, and Takaezu in her closed forms, which shifted her ceramics from the potentially utilitarian to the purely sculptural. Throughout their lives, Takaezu and Tawney maintained an ongoing dialogue, their work and ideas constantly informing one another. In the exhibition, the circle at the center of Tawney’s Heart mirrors the forms of Takaezu’s moons below. “I’m fascinated with the roundness of the moon,” Tawney said, in 1976, “and how it symbolizes the fullness of the universe.” Worlds Within, the show’s title, is drawn in part from Takaezu’s description of the vast interiority of her works, how “it’s as if the whole universe is right inside the pot.” 

Takaezu’s vessels became larger over the course of her career, expanding directionally upwards as well as inwards, with a negative generosity to the form. She was, as one curator Glenn Adamson writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, deeply “devoted to her work’s interiors.” Informed by the work of the nineteenth-century Japanese poet, Buddhist nun, and ceramicist, Ōtagaki Rengetsu—who would inscribe verse in her glazes in sgraffito—Takaezu occasionally etched words on the inside of her closed forms. Takaezu emphasized the interiors of the vessels as well as the surrounding three-dimensional space created by closing a ceramic form; in moving away from functionalism, Takaezu created a greater surface area for chance and experiment. Although Takaezu would sometimes sketch onto her pots with a pencil to outline the pattern of her painted glaze, she would often forgo those lines and resort to something more instinctive and gestural in the moment. Her glazes tend towards earthier shades of charcoal and umber (on some works the dark carbon imprints of Raku firing are visible) but they also reference Hawaii—where Takaezu grew up—in the deep purple, turquoise and raspberry of her “Ocean Edge” series, and in her distinctive cobalt, which she named Makaha Blue, after a popular surfing beach on Oahu.  

Many of Takaezu’s vessels have a sonic component, a “rattle,” that results from small pieces of inserted hardened clay—a feature that co-curators Adamson, Kate Wiener, and Leilehua Lanzilotti centralize. Takaezu described this aspect of her closed forms as “sending messages.” Lanzilotti, a Kanaka Maoli composer and sound artist, has held a continued interest in these aural components. In a video by Lanzilotti showing on the first floor of the museum, the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky (2023), the camera renders mostly still, soft-focus shots of Kilauea, Mauna Loa, and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, accompanied by the persistent drone of a recording from Takaezu’s vessels. In a video upstairs, in close shots of Takaezu’s ceramics, Lanzilotti uses the variously pitched vessels like instruments, shaking them or creating reverberations by pounding on their sides with a closed fist. 

The Noguchi Museum, in connection with Worlds Within, is offering a daily program where visitors can hold and activate three of Takaezu’s vessels. The day I attended, there was a shy energy of reverence amongst the group, and I watched as one participant interacted with a vessel for longer than anyone else, shaking it softly, the clay beads contained inside rattling quietly, then tilting it slowly, attempting to map in sound the work’s unseen interior, its ridges and places of resonance. “You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used,” Takaezu wrote in Ceramics Monthly in 1975, “An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.”