Masaomi Yasunaga’s ceramics are containers of souls

There’s something distant and yet so unnervingly familiar about Masaomi Yasunaga’s crumbling ceramics. They could have been dredged up from the sea floor. Their messy, unrefined forms and sometimes faded, sometimes vibrant glazes resemble acid-bleached coral reefs, mineral-encrusted thermal vents and Bronze Age shipwrecks. Around 80 of these artworks make up his current exhibition ‘Clouds in the Distance’ at Lisson Gallery, London.

For Masaomi, form follows emotion. He is the latest in a line of Japanese ceramicists looking to break the mould. He was a student of Satoru Hoshino and is a follower of Sodeisha, which translates to something like ‘the Crawling through Mud Association’. This post-war movement called for emotive, expressive ceramics that broke free of the strict lines of tradition and the need for useful objects. Masaomi tells me, via a translator, that his art begins with his hands, and his theory comes afterwards – knowing when to stop working and start thinking is the hardest part.

Recently, Masaomi has started making pottery without clay — just pure glaze. He mixes the glaze with water until it forms a paste, and then he treats it like clay. Sometimes he embeds metal, quartz or small tiles in it. It might not sound radical, but it’s like removing the canvas from a painting or stripping the concrete beams out of a building. What usually provides decoration, now provides structure. The titles of his works reflect the sense of emptiness and fragility: Skeleton of a Box 2023, Stone Bone 2022 and Empty Creature 2017.

About those Empty Creatures: they’re small pots and bottles that have been gently teased into vaguely animal forms. Birds, a pair of camels, perhaps an ox or a pig? They remind me of the kind of ancient grave offerings you see at the British Museum. I ask Masaomi if these are vessels or forms. He says it’s hard to explain. He started making these after the birth of his first child, and if they are anything, they’re containers of souls.

He draws connections between ceramic vessels and human bodies: before we are born we are contained by the womb, after our death we are contained by the earth. Ceramics link human life, earth, and vessels: when he fires his ceramics, he buries them in sand; when he uncovers them, it’s like a rebirth. He points to a pure white glazed globe mounted on a plinth. This work developed from an earlier project that he undertook when his grandmother died. After her cremation, he took her ashes and mixed them with glaze to make commemorative blocks for the family.

Sometimes you need to take a step back from the turbulence of day-to-day life and remind yourself that this moment is just one point on a timeline –or a cycle. Masaomi’s art does this. It calls back, but it also reminds you that for all of history, every pot or cup or plate or artefact that’s now broken was once cared for and loved and lost by someone before you – distant, yet familiar.