There are many poetic metaphors in pottery: I think that my experience has taught me that people and vessels share similarities in the breadth and ability of acceptance. This is the sanctuary that ceramics offers.
Tokoname-based ceramic artist Kato Mami creates vessels as sites of contemplation, connection, and feeling. Her works have received wide acclaim, including multiple Grand Prizes at the prestigious Mino Ceramics Exhibition in Gifu. Monumental and poetic, her vessels are hand-built through a demanding process of layering, folding, and draping porcelain slabs. Their surfaces are finished with her signature “Frost Glaze,” a luminous, icy blue she developed, which shimmers like meltwater across glacial terrain. These works invite and deeply reward slow looking.
Her celebrated chawan (tea bowls) compress imagined landscapes into forms that rest within the hand. Draped over molds, her tea bowls embraces asymmetry and subtle distortion, emphasizing it's mikomi (見込み, interior space). This space becomes a site of convergence between human and object. Kato’s career reached a landmark in 2015 when she became the first woman to win the Shoroku Chawan Competition, followed by further honors including the Grand Prize at the 2019 Mino Ceramics Exhibition and the 2021 Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition.
Kato’s journey with clay began during a period of illness while she was in university studying at the Doshisha Women's College of Liberal arts in Kyoto. During that quiet and vulnerable time, she first encountered clay, at her father's recommendation. Its gentle textures and forms became a source of deep comfort and discovery. Reflecting on this memory, she has shared: