Black Lacquer Object with Channelled Form by Mayumi ONAGI

A compact sculptural object of irregular, pebble-like form, its surface gathered into broad ridges and deep channels that sweep across and around the body like wind-driven drapery or water-worn rock. Toward one end the ridges tighten into narrow, fin-like points, while elsewhere they swell into soft, rounded folds. The whole is finished in black lacquer, matte on the upper half and highly polished to a mirror-like gloss on the lower half, so that the form appears to change character as the light moves across it. The underside bears the artist's seal in red lacquer.

Born in Tokyo in 1979, ONAGI Mayumi is a woman lacquer artist who trained in art and design and worked first as a garden designer before turning to lacquer. She learned the urushi technique as an apprentice to the lacquer artist OHNISHI Nagatoshi, honorary professor at Tokyo University of the Arts, and subsequently established herself as an independent artist and teacher. Her work centres on kanshitsu, the dry lacquer technique in which layers of hemp cloth and clay are built up and hardened with lacquer, which she at times combines with wood carving. In 2022 she was selected as one of thirty finalists for the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize, and her work was shown in the prize exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Craft Art.