His whimsical and erotic envelope-vessel forms from the 1980s celebrate life’s intimate connections—lovers, family, mother and child—as well as couplings from mythology. Matt blue pockmarked skin and eyes dripping tears of figures and a drawing on the third eye.

Drawing on his childhood in Japan, Takamori creates loose communities of figures that are made up of individual pieces with unique, carefully crafted identities.

Growing up in postwar Japan, Takamori experienced a mélange of cultural influences. Since those first years at the Kansas City Art Institute his work has changed greatly, but it has always been figurative, based on the human body and expressive of human emotion and sensuality.

In the 1980s, Takamori worked innovatively with the vessel form and its structure, creating flat envelope shaped pots formed from slabs.

The artist’s work, often autobiographical, has focused in recent years on figurative sculpture. The forms he creates of villagers, school children, shopkeepers and infants have been modeled from memory. Readers who want in-depth details should see Between Clouds and Memory, edited by Peter Held, a catalogue published for Takamori’s mid-career survey exhibition in 2005 at Arizona State University.

They cause us to think differently, feel more passionately – indeed, they change our very core perceptions. Both Takamori and Isupov are very much part of the ‘cooked’ school: refined, finished, developed, elegant, polished and skilled.

There are infinite ways to handle the complexities of this difficult and intricate medium.

Busker is handled in a similar fashion.

Glen Adamson has discussed similar issues but has extended the analogy to using objects such as the “figurine” and the “maquette” where the figurine is labeled “over refined” and the maquette “unfinished”. These larger-than-life size portraits are caricatures, exaggerations of every man and every woman; bi-gender headshots.

Who are these people, what do they do, think and feel?

He was a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana.

WIKIPEDIA — Akio Takamori

Akio Takamori is a Japanese-American ceramic sculptor and is a faculty member at the University of Washington.

Biography

Takamori was born in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, Japan in 1950.

In recent years the dramatic, overtly sexual imagery of the vessel forms of the 1980’s and early 90’s have given way to quieter, more contemplative sculptural works that reflect Takamori’s ever-evolving relationship to clay.

Biography

Through clay and works on paper, Akio Takamori explores human relationships: interpersonal, archetypal, social and historical.

The eyes drip with male and female bodies suggesting that the mind’s eye is capable o f revealing more about relationships and ourselves. At home, his father’s extensive library of both art and medical texts became a fascination for Takamori, who relished everything from Picasso reproductions to anatomical charts.

Takamori’s interest in the arts persisted into early adulthood and upon his graduation from the Musashino Art College in 1971, he apprenticed to a master folk potter at Koishiwara, Kyushu.

The shape of the head reveals another ethnicity, almost Buddha-like or Egyptian. There is an eeriness about them. As his studio grew so did his kiln and, with that, a technical shift from porcelain to stoneware. Since those first years at the Kansas City Art Institute his work has changed greatly, but it has always been figurative, based on the human body and expressive of human emotion and sensuality.

In 1974 he did just this, receiving his B.F.A.