Ceramicist Noe Kuremoto’s intense interest in ancient female talismans arose from a moment of crisis. Sitting in her studio, crying — she had just received an ultimatum from her husband: start a family or else part ways — she picked up a pencil and found herself sketching dogū figures. These clay figurines, which emerged from Japan’s Jōmon era (10,000BC–300BC), are symbols of fertility — with “big breasts, big tummies,” she says. “It just came out.” The question of if — and when — to have children was explored with haunting nuance in a number of artworks in the Hayward Gallery’s recent touring exhibition, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. In Lea Cetera’s womb-shaped hourglass work, titled “You Can’t Have It All” (2022), time is shown slipping away, grains of sand stuck in the ovaries. Painter Caroline Walker depicts bottles and pumps on the draining board or puts a spotlight on overlooked nursery workers. French multimedia sculptor Camille Henrot highlights the quiet, lonely work of breastfeeding. Motherhood is a rich seam for art — but has been less so in design. That is subtly changing. Indeed, it had not been a subject hitherto in mind for Kuremoto. Raised in Osaka, Japan, she arrived in London to study at Central Saint Martins in the 1990s, amid the heyday of Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Marina Abramović. “I thought this is it, I want to be them,” she recalls. The narrative of the western independent woman “was very healthy for me as a young Japanese girl,” she says. “And I capitalised on that.” Her career as a ceramicist became fast-paced, making pieces for a cycle of international art fairs.
Ceramicist Noe Kuremoto’s intense interest in ancient female talismans arose from a moment of crisis. Sitting in her studio, crying — she had just received an ultimatum from her husband: start a family or else part ways — she picked up a pencil and found herself sketching dogū figures. These clay figurines, which emerged from Japan’s Jōmon era (10,000BC–300BC), are symbols of fertility — with “big breasts, big tummies,” she says. “It just came out.” The question of if — and when — to have children was explored with haunting nuance in a number of artworks in the Hayward Gallery’s recent touring exhibition, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood. In Lea Cetera’s womb-shaped hourglass work, titled “You Can’t Have It All” (2022), time is shown slipping away, grains of sand stuck in the ovaries. Painter Caroline Walker depicts bottles and pumps on the draining board or puts a spotlight on overlooked nursery workers. French multimedia sculptor Camille Henrot highlights the quiet, lonely work of breastfeeding. Motherhood is a rich seam for art — but has been less so in design. That is subtly changing. Indeed, it had not been a subject hitherto in mind for Kuremoto. Raised in Osaka, Japan, she arrived in London to study at Central Saint Martins in the 1990s, amid the heyday of Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Marina Abramović. “I thought this is it, I want to be them,” she recalls. The narrative of the western independent woman “was very healthy for me as a young Japanese girl,” she says. “And I capitalised on that.” Her career as a ceramicist became fast-paced, making pieces for a cycle of international art fairs.
Kuremoto’s eventual decision to start a family proved a turning point personally and professionally, though things didn’t change all at once. Two weeks after her first son was born in 2019, she was back in her London studio, pretending nothing had happened. “I was so afraid. I didn’t even want to talk about it,” she says. But with her second, her mother came over from Japan to help the family and something shifted. “I began to enjoy it, I gave myself a new narrative.” She began creating what was to prove a continuing series of vessels — some of which will be on display at PAD London design fair this October — inspired by the Jōmon era’s rituals and folk tales, interpreted through a contemporary lens. Her own dogū versions “are for my girlfriends and all the women facing the same fears and concerns [as I did] before they become mothers”. Often grouped together like an offering, their sinuous shapes carry new power. “The danger has shifted from childbirth to identity,” she says. “Women are fighting for their identity and what happens to them post-birth.”