Project blends Arkansas clay with Japanese fire
LOCKESBURG, Ark. — Sitting in a clearing amidst the woods near this Southwest Arkansas town, an art project combines Natural State clay with Japanese fire.
Tucked inside a metal-and-wood, open-air enclosure that beats back the elements and, it is hoped, dissuades any critters who come ambling by the site, a long, clay kiln straddles the gently sloping hillside.
A sign announces what’s here: “Tsuchigama Project.” A banner with Japanese script proclaims a blessing for this space, which takes centuries-old techniques and transports them to a place where Caddoan clay is to be found.
In that sense, the Tsuchigama Project is a marriage of at least two cultures, connected by a love for the land and the art that it makes. What fires the kiln when it’s going? Wood from nearby fallen trees.
For this project, Chris Powell, an associate professor of art at Texas Christian University who grew up here in Sevier County, has partnered with artisans from Japan, including the renowned Japanese artist Tadashi Hirakawa from Bizen, an Okayama Prefecture city recognized for its pottery traditions.
It was first built during the summer of 2015, and since then it’s been fired twice with ware inside of it.
Powell’s no stranger to this land because he grew up here and still has family roots here. In an artist’s statement, he writes that it’s an honor to use clay used by Native Americans who lived here to now make pottery that’s fired with an Eastern technique.
“The result is a blend of cultures and a continuation of the strong ceramic traditions of this land,” Powell writes.
And creating a tsuchigama kiln here in rural Arkansas is part of Hirakawa’s endeavors to build these kilns and exhibit the artwork fired in them. In 1989, Hirakawa started restoring medieval kilns in Bizen, and then he built his first tsuchigama kiln in 2002.
He explains it thus at his website: “The project is for Tadashi Hirakawa to revive the fundamental wisdom of the past and pass it on to the future.”
About a year ago, Hirakawa’s art was included in an exhibit of recent acquisitions at Museum of the Red River in Idabel, Oklahoma. This vase was joined by a ceramic bottle made by his apprentice, Yukiko Akai.
A news release from the museum explained the significance this way: “The two ceramics were made in North America’s only tsuchigama kiln, in nearby Sevier County. The kiln is a successful recreation of Japan’s earliest ‘slope’ kilns. The tsuchigama project is the result of decades of research by Mr. Hirakawa and a team of archaeologists, curators, and other artists.”
Work fired in the kiln has also been exhibited in the Artspace111 gallery in Fort Worth, Texas.
Talking about the project while seated at the project site under a towering live oak tree, Powell enjoys the chance to play show and tell with some of the pottery made here.
“The two summers we’ve worked here, this has just been an outdoor studio space, and then the space expands,” Powell said. He’s had up to six people working there some summers — potters from Japan. The connection originated with an exchange program, which brought Japanese artists to Dallas, and from there he developed relationships with Japanese artists.
Bizen, Powell explained, is one of the large kiln sites in Japan. A potter there — Hirakawa — suggested he fire a kiln there with him, and then he’d come to Arkansas to return the favor as Powell built a kiln here.
“I thought, what a sweet deal,” Powell recalled. He and Hirakawa each brought assistants to work on the kiln, and then they returned to fire the kiln a second time with ware inside of it.
“That’s the end process. That’s where you make work, put it in the kiln and get that work up to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit — I mean really hot,” Powell said.
Up until the time the Europeans came, he explained, local kilns only reached temperatures of 1,800 degrees — out of necessity all they could do. “The clay is mature, but it is porous,” he said. That’s the Caddo work we see in museums.
“That technology took a huge advance in China and Japan about 2,000 years ago,” Powell said. “That’s when we were able to fire to higher temperatures.” While it’s the type of kiln used a thousand years ago in Japan, it’s not what’s used today, he explained.
The kiln construction meant the heat could be held and built. “Until then it was just like a bonfire,” Powell said. The first one potters dug a hole into the hill and were likely able to fire it just once, he said, because it collapsed. Then mud was placed over bamboo to make the kiln, and then from there bricks began to be used. This was how it developed over time.
The Far East is where these advancements were made. “About 200 A.D. is when the Chinese were able to push right over that threshold and start getting those superhigh temperatures,” Powell said. This brought porcelain — “a clay body that almost goes to a hard glass.”
The kiln technique migrated to Korea and then Japan, Powell said. Such technology was spread by skilled artisans and their families moving to a new area. In Japan, the technique advanced further. Kilns, he said, would last a generation and brick kilns would get so big it took the village a year to fill them and fire them.
In this way, a series of evolutions made kilns more and more successful, starting with the ability to use the “lay of the land,” as Powell puts it, and then with the use of bricks. “These kilns are long and lay on the hillside so that there’s a natural draft,” he said. The heat is sucked through it.
Hundreds of years later, the Europeans finally caught on to fire their kilns at high, stoneware temperatures, the professor explained.
“It’s a combination of having the right materials at the right time and the right kinds of things going on,” Powell said. Later, the industrial revolution and factories meant the craft was largely lost. However, the Arts and Crafts movement that started in England around 1900 sought to revive the craftsmanship.
Now, Powell has the ongoing Tsuchigama Project on property his family owns. Walking up to it, he sees cattle hoofprints and talks about wild hog sightings. “This is, I think, one-half scale of the original ones made about 700 A.D. in Japan,” he said, noting Hirakawa decided to scale down the tsuchigama kiln.
“I’m glad he did, because it took us all summer to build this,” Powell said. “We are mixing the clay on site.” Clay and sand deposits are near by what he calls a perfect slope. Bamboo frames were used to make the kiln’s tunnel — a big tube, really — where the ditch was dug and the shed was built.
“You’d be amazed the sound this thing makes when you get a fire going in it … it is just sucking air,” said Powell. The flames roar through the tunnel.
When you peer into the kiln now after these firings (four-and-a-half days apiece), in a certain light you can see the glistening sides. “The clay has gotten so hot that it’s turning to glass,” he said.
How much pottery is fired in this massive kiln? “We probably had 200 pieces in each firing,” he said.
Powell remembers the first museum he visited was MoRR during his high school days. He learned something then when he saw the Caddo pottery — about the little pieces of clay he’d find where he lived. “I had been picking up little shards of things but had never seen what they were,” Powell said.
He thinks that realization, that moment of wonder, is why he’s here today, involved in a tsuchigama project like this that uses Asian pottery techniques and local, Arkansas clay. Powell teaches, but he also creates sculpture made from pottery.
At Powell’s website, his bio states: “A recipient of numerous public and private commissions for outdoor sculpture, Powell employs stone, clay, and other traditional materials to explore the abstract shapes of plants, animals, and natural phenomena.”
A graduate of the Bradley University’s MFA program, where he realized he loved teaching, Powell recalls that as a youngster he could be found playing in the dirt here with his friend, making forts from the mud.
“It’s just a natural thing, to have always had an affinity for clay,” Powell said, and the Tsuchigama Project tweaks his interest not only in art, but also history, archaeology and anthropology. The way it’s conceived, the project won’t last too long. That’s the way of it, that eventually the kiln will fall apart.
“My vision is to keep it stable and fire it again,” he says.
(On the Net: Tsuchigama. com/en/arkansas.)