Would you like to experience creating your own haniwa (Ancient Japanese Clay Figurine) while practicing your English? Let’s learn how to create haniwa together! Beginners in English and crafts are welcome to join.
※ The workshop is conducted in English. Please feel free to use any tools (e.g. translation apps, writing, drawings) to communicate. A Japanese interpreter is also present at the event.
【Capacity】4 groups (1~2 persons / per group) (8 persons in maximum)
Reservation needed in advance through google resevation form
【Participation Fee】1000 yen / per piece (tell us how many when you make a reservation)
【What to bring】If you would like to take your haniwa home, it is recommended to bring a small box for transport.
【Workshop Flow】
Presentation introducing haniwa and how to make them in simple English (approx. 15min)
Working on haniwa (includes set- and clean-up)
(approx. 1hr15min)
【Important Notice】It may take several days for the clay to dry. Please be careful while transporting the figurines. ※Figurines need to be taken on the day and cannot be left at AIRY to dry.
My practice is grounded in practice-led research and explores “inherited gaps” — distances in cultural knowledge shaped by disrupted transmission rather than direct loss. I work through ambiguity, fragmentation, and partial memory as productive conditions for making.
Drawing
from Southeast Asian and diasporic contexts, I engage material culture,
placemaking, and myth-making as artistic strategies. Objects, textiles,
gestures, and spatial narratives function as vessels of memory and cosmology.
Through drawing, material experimentation, mapping, and speculative narrative,
I construct conceptual spaces that act as counter-myths — alternative ways of
thinking about identity, belonging, and cultural persistence. I work not as an
ethnographer, but through artistic encounter and response, where site,
material, and process shape the direction of the work.
Closing InvitationIf anything in this talk connects with your own experiences, I would be very grateful to continue the conversation.
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ちなみに本日の選書は工芸分野リサーチの作家に合わせてみました
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「House of Loom」
Artist: Mriz Sidah (Singapore)
Assisted by: Lisa Jakowski(Germany)
Date and Time: June 7 2026, 10:00-1400
Venue: Oboko-san
ハウス・オブ・ルーム
アーティスト：ムリズ・シダ（シンガポール）
アシスタント：リサ・ヤコウスキー（ドイツ）
日時：2026年6月7日 10:00～14:00
会場：Gateway おぼこさん
Project Synopsis : Through my fieldwork in Yamanashi, I gradually realised that craft is not simply about making objects. Whether it is silk weaving, woodworking, temple inns, farming, or textiles, each practice depends on a larger network of relationships involving people, materials, tools, knowledge, landscapes, climate, and time. What initially appeared as separate industries or traditions began to reveal themselves as interconnected ecosystems. The abandoned silk house became significant because it embodies many of these relationships. It was not just a place where silk was produced, but a structure designed around the rhythms of sericulture, family life, labour, and seasonal cycles. This led me to think of the house as a loom. Not because it once supported silk production, but because a loom is a structure that brings different threads together and holds them in relationship. The house similarly gathers multiple layers of time, memory, labour, and knowledge. It contains traces of past lives, present absences, and possible futures. In this sense, the house becomes a metaphorical loom through which the stories, ecosystems, and cultural memories of Yamanashi continue to be woven together, even after the original pattern has begun to unravel.
b.1986 Japan. Lives and works in Castlemaine/ Dja Dja Wurrung
Nakamura uses stone carving to make installations, drawing on ideas of Japanese Shinto animism and ritualistic practices, investigates what arises from generating forms with natural materials. Her recent work explores the complexity of female embodied experiences and reimagines the narratives of feminine subjectivity for empowerment. Nakamura first studied Fine Art Foundation at Byam Shaw School of Art at Central Saint Martin’s College, London followed by undergraduate studies with honours from The University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts (2011) and completed a Master of Visual Art from Latrobe University (2024). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts; Melbourne University. Recent solo exhibitions include: What our bodies bring to us, Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Albury NSW (2026), In the beginning was Chaos, Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, Collingwood Yards (2023), The force that the warrior adopts during the evolution of the pale pink rose, Caves, Melbourne (2019), Erosion, Gertrude Glasshouse, Collingwood (2018). Selected group exhibitions include: A Velvet Ant, a Flower and a Bird: Telling Intelligence Otherwise, curated by Chus Martínez, Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2026); In The Making, Craft Victoria, Melbourne (2025); Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: The Burden of Object, the Villa Alba Museum(2024); Hans Bellmer x Noriko Nakamura, Peon Parc, Brunswick VIC (2024) ; Maternal inheritances, Latrobe Arts Institute, Latrobe University, Bendigo, curated by Amelia Wallin (2023); wHole, Heide Museum, Bulleen, curated Melissa Keys (2022) and Choose Happiness Murray Art Museum, Albury NSW curated by Serena Bentley (2021)
noriko-nakamura.com
@norikonakamuracat
Artist Statement
My work explores the complexity of female embodied experiences and reimagines the narratives of feminine subjectivity for empowerment. My installation reflects on women’s experiences of bodily transformations such as pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. I explored the complexities of female embodied transformations while expanding my ongoing influence of Japanese animism Shinto in my practice through working with natural materials.
