Japan: Mindful Making in Japan

About this Travel Course

Japan offers a unique laboratory to study both by observation and hands-on experience the influence of culture, geography, and geology on the growth and development of material art. The focus will be ceramics. The five-week experience is essentially divided into two distinctly different but related parts, each of which provides a structured learning environment with very particular outcomes: The first part of the course will essentially concentrate on the development of a personal sketchbook / journal through a temple stay and visits to contemporary and historical sites of production and studios in central Japan. Important architectural sites, both old and new, from Okayama to Kyoto and Nara will be visited. An interim review of the sketchbooks will concentrate on the interpretation of the accumulated drawings from each student into a spatial object or objects to be fired in the kilns of the Kuramaki Studio in central Nara Prefecture. Although this process will be the focus of the latter part of the Wintersession there will be ample opportunity for further visits in the historically significant region surrounding the studio. The course will culminate with a documented exhibition of the "Clay in Japan", in Japan