Episode 1 / JILL FANSHAWE-KATO Tallisman & Magic.
In this first episode I talk to Jill about talisman, magic, making pots in Devon, London and Japan and about the things that inspire her. There’s also a little guest section from her photo-journalist husband Setsuo.
More information about Jill
> Website Jill Fanshawe-Kato
> Instagram @jillfanshawekato
‘Over the past three decades Jill’s distinctive stoneware vessels decorated with images drawn from the natural world have been exhibited internationally, but most particularly in Japan and the UK. Fanshawe Kato frequently visits Japan to exhibit and study and her work is suffused with an intelligent understanding of the particular art of Japanese pots which she also in a modest way collects. The tactile, animated qualities- the ‘atatakai’ as the Japanese expression has it- are clearly evident in her work. Yet there is also in the stylised bird, fish and plant forms and indeed the bold, gestural abstract blocks of colours, a quintessentially English quality, a kind of gentle humour that one sees in the works of painters such as Mary Newcombe or the illustrations of Eric Ravilious. Jill uses the unglazed surface of the vessel- usually a buff ochre colour, sometimes textured- as a counterpoint to the incised or painted imagery. The images both draw the eye as they stand alone in their field of colour, but through their careful placing around the volume of the pot they also serve to emphasise the form. In this way painting and pot become one, fusing as it were the different cultures from which they spring.’
