Tristan Hoare Gallery is thrilled to announce Kaori Tatebayashi’s new works in bronze. These works mark one of the most exciting and adventurous developments in her practice to date.
Tatebayashi herself did not anticipate this moment. ‘At this stage in my life, you don't always expect to start something new,’ she reflects. Yet the willingness to begin again, to submit to a medium that requires sustained trial and error, speaks to the curiosity that has always been fundamental to her way of working.
Born in Arita, the birthplace of Japanese Imari porcelain production, Tatebayashi has always brought an almost involuntary precision to the natural world. ‘From a young age, I was surrounded by ceramics, and I think that had a strong unconscious influence on me.’ It is this eye, trained on delicacy, that she now brings to a material as ancient and unyielding as bronze.
The texture she achieves with clay, so integral to the presence of her ceramic surfaces, did not transfer readily into bronze. It was only through extensive experimentation that Tatebayashi discovered sanding down the finished casting was the critical step: ‘This step isn’t necessary if the original is made in wax, which wasn’t the case for me.’ Colour, too, entered the work as a necessity. Faced with the coolness of the metal, she found that she could not leave it unaddressed and introduced patina into the work. ‘I began to feel that it was necessary to soften the coldness of the bronze.’ The colours emerge from chemical reactions between heat and material, leaving a result that is unrepeatable and entirely new to her practice.
Tatebayashi’s own theory of ‘capturing time’ as a unique quality of working with clay shifts as her new works in bronze ground the flowers and plants, making time feel more permanent within the ever-changing world. It is this quality that undergoes a quite transformation in bronze. Where clay preserves the fleeting, bronze grounds it, making time feel settled. The botanicals in these new works carry the same intricate veining and fragile turn of a petal or stem, but weighted now with a permanence that feels, paradoxically, more alive to mortality.
These bronze works do not seek to reproduce what already exists in ceramics; they evolve independently, running alongside. Tatebayashi has created an expansion of her practice that now holds two materials in parallel, each saying something the other cannot.
