Aaron Scythe
Sixteen years spent living, working and exhibiting extensively in Japan inform Aaron Scythe’s ceramic process. He uses the notion of kintsugi, where chipped or broken pots are repaired with lacquer and gold leaf or powder, and yobitsugi, which is like a jigsaw puzzle of different shards joined together. Porcelain and stoneware shards from different pots are joined when wet. The shards are intuitive yet deliberate, as is the intricate painting on the surface. The imagery can be mysterious – pieces of landscape, fragments of text, body parts and patterns – all gathered into a single pot. The process is fraught as the different materials react differently to heat during firing, but the resulting pots have a liveliness and presence that set his work apart. That liveliness is also due to the speed at which he works, the apparent mistakes that he harnesses and his skill in capturing the fluidity of the clay to “hold the emotions of the maker”.