Tomonari Hashimoto "Yet, yet again."

PARCEL is pleased to present Yet, yet again., a solo exhibition by Tomonari Hashimoto. This exhibition marks Hashimoto’s return to PARCEL, four years after his first solo presentation in 2022. Yet, yet again. brings together new works that offer a close survey of Hashimoto’s practice as it stands now. Tomonari Hashimoto is an artist based in Shigaraki, Shiga Prefecture, where he creates large-scale ceramic sculpture. Hashimoto’s works take the form of cubes, spheres, and columns, geometric shapes that are deceptively quiet and measured at first glance. These balanced forms are born from the dialogue between a desire to perfect a shape and the resistance of clay, a material that refuses to be fully controlled. Formed through the hand-building technique of coiling (tebineri), where clay is rolled into ropes and stacked layer by layer, the monumental mass of clay warps subtly under its own weight, and continues to change throughout the processes of drying and firing. Hashimoto embraces each transformation, adding and removing clay, smoothing and roughening, at times letting a form fall apart before building it back up again. By repeating this cycle many times over, Hashimoto approaches his envisioned form one small step at a time. Each work bears handmarks, carving marks, cracks, brushwork, and bleeding of metallic glaze on the surface, all arising naturally in the course of his creative process. What may appear at first glance to be the work of chance withholds something deeper. Beneath the surface lies the quiet accumulation of time spent moving back and forth between the mind and the material, and the memory of the artist’s body at work. The new series presented in this exhibition is built around the color white. Setting aside the vivid metallic glaze that has long been a signature of his work, he strips away chromatic detail to engage more closely than ever before with form itself, and at his relationship with the clay as a material. Faintly visible beneath white layers are traces of brushwork, the bleeding of metal, unevenness in the clay, and the slight wavering left by the hands. Marks once hidden beneath deep colors are now brought to the surface. The works are all the richer for it, as the accumulated trace of Hashimoto’s long engagement with his material is made newly vivid. Repetition runs through the exhibition title Yet, yet again. However close Hashimoto comes to the form he envisions, the clay refuses to hold still. And still he continues to come back to the clay again and again, building form upon form. This endless repetition is not about making the same thing twice, but it is a practice through which his sculptural language is quietly and incrementally renewed. Through this new series, the exhibition follows closely how Tomonari Hashimoto is currently approaching sculptural form. What emerges in the stillness is time held within the material, and the bodily traces the artist has laid down through years of making. We invite you to encounter Hashimoto’s practice as it stands now — a body of work formed through continual repetition, the change compounding with every return to the clay.