A baseball swing is a very finely tuned instrument,’ Reggie Jackson once said of his greatest asset on the ball field. ’It is repetition, and more repetition, then a little more after that.’ The same might be said about the touch of a great ceramicist. While LA-based potter Shio Kusaka is almost self-deprecating to a fault about her own talent, she is effusive about the skills that have been honed by her assistants over the past few years. In short, they got so good at making larger pots – Kusaka focuses on more petite, asymmetrical vessels that show her hand in their construction – she asked them to start making traditional Japanese, Chinese, Greek and Cypriot forms. When the wheel was invented, people all over the world tried to make a perfect circle, she explains. ’That was their goal but [some] people couldn’t do it because of their skill. But I like that feeling where it’s off,’ says Kusaka. ’It’s very different than making it off on purpose. That’s an expression. I grew up with that in Japan. I get shy from that and shy from the perfect form.’
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