THE INBETWEEN

HB381 is pleased to announce THE INBETWEEN, an exhibition of new ceramic works by Shozo Michikawa (b. 1953, Japan). Michikawa creates expressive gestural sculptures inspired by nature and his native Japanese landscape.

In August 1977, the volcanic terrain of Michikawa’s hometown began to shift and grumble. Lake Tōya, formed in the caldera of the active volcano Mount Usu, sits on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaidō. Seismic rumblings issued from the earth and new vents opened along Usu’s slopes. The pent-up pressure emerged in a series of four eruptions over three days, in which columns of white ash rose to ten kilometers in height, traversing the troposphere and inundating the stratosphere. Cracks formed in the windows of airplanes overhead and trees were stripped entirely bare, their leaves singed before evaporating in the molten pyrotechnic atmosphere. The eruptive clouds developed their own storm systems, lashed by lightning, raining pumice stones—some up to 20 centimeters in diameter. The area’s seven thousand residents returned to find a new landscape carved into the mountain’s slopes, now deformed and interrupted with trenches, rifts, ash, and mineral debris.