Toshiaki Noda

Provenance: Courtesy of the Artist

Toshiaki Noda (b. 1982) lives and works in New York City. He was born in Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan, a region noted for its remarkable porcelain ceramics dating back to the 1600s. His parents are ceramic dealers in this treasured craft, where Toshiaki lived in an incomparable aesthetic culture influencing his studio practice today. Toshiaki studied ceramics at Arita technical High School, and visual arts focusing on printmaking at California State University Long Beach. After graduating the school, he moved to New York City, where he started his artist career with a focus on ceramics as his primary medium. His printmaking education combined with his aesthetic and technical training in Japan lends a unique vision to his ceramic practice.

Unlike the smooth, consistent surface of the treasured Imari wares, Toshiaki uses the plasticity of clay to push boundaries of form, and the alchemy of glaze to explore texture. With spontaneity and curiosity as his guide, his sculptural planes contort with tension. His sculpting process includes hand-building, wheel-throwing, carving, stacking, undoing, and redoing with no predetermined endpoint.
As well as aesthetic aspect, Toshiaki’s work deals with the intersection of materiality, pottery, craft, design, sculpture, and the history of ceramics. He experiments with approaches to transforming conventional ceramic forms such as flower vases and tea bowls, and combining them with functional objects’ forms including garments, shoes, buckets, stacked egg cartons, bricks, and so on. Many of his sculptures go through a process that is characteristics of his practice where form is abstracted and becomes idiosyncratic, thus creating a new sense of realism. His goal is to recapture the concept and history of ceramic ware that has developed as a daily commodity. Toshiaki questions traditional craft and the boundaries between ceramics, fine art, decoration, and sculpture.
Toshiaki Noda’s recent exhibitions include Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo as well as exhibitions in New York and Milan,Italy. His work is included in the collection of The William Louis Dreyfus Foundation. He is a recipient of a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist fellowship. Toshiaki’s works have been reviewed in San Francisco Chronicle and Sculpture Magazine.