1981 – Anagama Kiln build in pictures
In 1980, Shiro Otani applied for and received an exchange fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts. He spent a year at the University of Tennessee, and a brief period at Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts, where he built and fired a Japanese-style, woodburning anagama. Shiro Otani directed the 1981 building and first firing of the kiln in a two-week summer workshop. In 1985, Shiro Otani returned to Arrowmont for three months to make work for a Tokyo exhibition. In the catalog for that show, he wrote: “Since Shigaraki ware is unglazed and carries no external design, its quality can only be expressed in such abstract words as ‘taste’ or ‘sense of understated elegance.’ Within these parameters, I asked myself what it was that I could add to Shigaraki. Looking out over the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I rethought these problems as if standing outside myself.”
