Céline Pelcé

These containers were successively used as burners to grill Nori seaweed, as bowls to drink Moss tea, and as vases to transport mountain botanicals. And above all, they were vessels to embody the link between the Sea and the Mountain. More specifically : the Seaside of Tokoname, the city they were made in, famous for its clay, and the mountain of Higashiyama, nearby my residency home in Kyoto.

Exploring the original relationship between Mountain and Sea through mythology, geology, and taste of the botanical, we conducted with Misa Murata our 3rd sensorial hike to talk about Origins : origins of the mountain (Sea), origins of Objects (the containers were made by Misa, inspired by ancestral Jomon-jin time), and the origin of Human activities. Some extracts from The Carrier Bag Theory of fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin were read by Misa who lives in Tokoname, and myself, staying at that time in Higashiyama.
In moss you can taste both soil and algae, in our body salty water is running, the mountain was once below the ocean.

We explored together with the hikers how powerful and peaceful tool a container could be, how it shaped the narrations we have to our environment, and how, using them with this awareness, we could relate to very ancestral notions of humanity.
We tasted the rocks of the mountain, the moss, which originates from Algae, and Nori from Tokoname, always doing this route back and forth between seaside and deep mountain forest

The containers were first burnt in Tokoname, then used during the Hike and filled with mountain botanicals, and finally they came back to Tokoname for a second burning, in Akira Koie primitive fire.
Ashes from the moutain inside, seaweed on the outside. These containers are now embodying the two faces of Japan landscape in its own core.

This project has been developed during my residency stay at Villa Kujoyama in 2021, with the support of Bettencourt Schueller Foundation and Institut français