art treatise living treasure By Marimar McNaughton | Photography by Allison Potter He is the Cape Fear’s celebrated clay artist, named, by the University of North Carolina Wilmington, a Living Treasure in 2006. Showcasing the work of native Japanese potter Hiroshi Sueyoshi, pieces collected from the 1970s through modern times, the Cameron Art Museum opens the retrospective, “A Matter of Reverence” November 14. Did he choose the title of the show? “No,” he whispers, shaking his head, smiling. Mashiko, the renowned Japanese pottery town, is 100 miles north of Tokyo. In the late 1960s Hiroshi Sueyoshi was 22 or 23 years old when he accepted the invitation from a friend to make the eight-hour journey. “It was like Seagrove,” Hiroshi says, compar-ing Mashiko with North Carolina’s iconic pot-tery center. “They make functional jars, nice bowls.” Traditional American pottery has been produced in Seagrove since the 18th century. Traditional Japanese pottery has been produced in Mashiko since the mid 19th century when native clay was discovered and a kiln built to fire it. “A friend of mine was going to pottery town,” Hiroshi says of the invitation. “The following week I moved to pottery town.” Hiroshi had attended engineering school but did not finish. Instead he pursued industrial design, then abandoned his studies to become an appren-tice at Mashiko. As the second son born into the Hiroshi family, Sueyoshisan was somewhat freer to make his own way in the world. “Sometimes in Japan you have tea ceremony, flower arrangement, you drink green tea four or five times of day, you have all kinds of dishes for Japanese food, department store have pot-tery display. … It’s just there all the time,” he explains. But Hiroshi’s trip to Mashiko would be the first time he saw pottery made and a week later, for the first time, he would make pottery with his own hands. Torso Vase, 2002, 17.25 x 7.5 x 7.25 inches, stoneware with crawl glaze, collection of Cameron Art Museum; gift of Andrew and Hathia Hayes. Opposite: Hiroshi Sueyoshi creates a body of new work at the Cameron Art Museum’s Pancoe Education Center. With red clay he sculpts a relief face into a rock formation. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAMERON ART MUSEUM 18 WBM november 2014
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