Shiro Oni Residency Exhibition, Onishi, Gunma, Japan, May 2026

At the end of the Shiro residency in May of this year, we held an exhibition in a 280 year old sake brewery. It was beautiful to show the contents of the Anagama alongside new friends and artists who shared this experience, Peter Osborn, Julia Hechanova, Hannah Fisch, Em Dubovney, Lucy Loewenberg, Cali Almy , Ciona Lee, Travis Kaup, as well as the founder Kjell Hahn and Bella Kubo.

The work I made for the residency exhibition looks at time as an amalgamation of bodily, seasonal and earthly cycles. The past few years have held a lot of loss. I didn’t grow up with many rituals to process grief, so I’ve turned to nature instead - to decay and composting as a necessary part of growth. I’m slowly finding peace with joy and sorrow as parts of the same cycle.

Growing up, time was the tick of a clock built for industrialisation. I’ve always found it hard to be on time, and maybe that ache is why I was drawn to clay. It’s a material that resists linear time. A descendant of rock, responsive to atmosphere. Timekeeping led by the material, not the hour.

This was my first trip to Japan. The respect for imperfection, age, and impermanence that runs through daily life here has stayed with me. Japan recognises 72 micro-seasons - a calendar built from small daily changes, a practice of ecological noticing I want to carry with me. In Onishi, I started to see time as polyrythmic, made in place. In the sakura’s bloom and fall. In the cicadas’ song. In the mountains turning green. In onsen water. In the ancient Sambaseki stone. In fermented bean. In fire. In the people around me.

My main piece is a moon cycle: 30 phases thrown off the hump and fired over a full lunar month - from the Pink Moon on April 1st to the Flower Moon on May 1st. An ode to our oldest clock. The title, The Moon in Me Looks Back at the Moon, comes from a line in Kawai Kanjiro’s poem Windows of Life, which I encountered on my first day in Japan.

Alongside it sat Remnant, Plinths for Stones and Cabinet of Cura and two little tea sets.