Three Porcelain Works That Held Their Ground

Akiko Hirai, Moon Jar Blue, 2024. Courtesy Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Three porcelain works from Objects of Contemplation at Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset each hold still while seeming to move. Akiko Hirai's Moon Jar Blue (2024) announces the group with immediate force. Fractured porcelain shards erupt from the vessel's shoulder in blue-grey clusters, referencing the traditional Korean moon jar while staging it as something mid-catastrophe. The body below is glazed in oceanic swirls of celadon, iron brown and matte white, a surface that reads as weather, or memory made visible.

Alice Walton, Nurturing Routes, 2023. Courtesy Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Alice Walton's Nurturing Routes (2023) offers a quieter counterpoint. Its pale, asymmetric dome is mapped in fine horizontal lines, a method of coiling made obsessive, with small raised rings scattered across the surface like pores or seeds. The effect is both geological and bodily, a topography that rewards slow looking.

Olivia Walker, Collapsed Porcelain Bowl I & II, 2024. Courtesy Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Olivia Walker's Collapsed Porcelain Bowls I and II (2024) close the group with something almost theatrical. Two smooth white bowls lean into each other, joined by an explosion of frilled clay between them, a mass of slip-built petals that calls to mind coral, mycelium, or the ruffled underside of a mushroom cap. Set against Hirai's violence and Walton's quiet, Walker's work feels like a third kind of energy entirely: exuberant, outward, alive.