Care and the Handmade

By La'Kayla Williams

May 3, 2024

Walker Publishing Filed to Learning · Part of Creative Care

Cup Exchange, 2003/2024. Photo by Kameron Herndon. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

In her poem Affirmations, well-worn and oft-cited in revolutionary activist circles, Assata Shakur writes: “I believe in the magic of hands.” Cue the scoffs and eye rolls of disbelief. To say belief in magic is controversial would be putting it lightly, yet the lifeblood of folk tales and Disney movies continues to play a role in the West’s cultural and artistic imagination. However, depictions of waving wands and curses spoken over black cauldrons are a far cry from what Shakur references in her poem. “The magic of hands” is the magic that comes with creating something from nothing. Of plucking an idea, intangible and ethereal, from the recesses of the mind and making it real. Instead of wands and potions, our hands become a source of power and radical change.

If belief in magic is too much of a stretch, at the very least, we can recognize there is power in the hands and in the handmade, specifically the attention and care it reveals in the maker and the effect it has on those who view or otherwise experience the work. This idea is explored in Tetsuya Yamada: Listening, which opened on January 18 and runs through July 7, 2024. Curated by Siri Enberg and Laurel Rand-Lewis, this mid-career survey of Yamada’s work focuses on ceramics but also expands to other mediums, such as found materials. For Yamada, hand-thrown ceramics are a point of departure in thinking about the everyday materials we come in contact with, how they are transformed by us, and how we are transformed by them. Yamada views his work as conversations between materials—his hands animate and personify them, thus surfacing meaning that was always there, but that may have gone unheard.

Let’s begin with Cup Exchange, an event where viewers were instructed to bring their own ceramic cups. On the left wall, as you enter the exhibition, a narrow shelf holds a variety of vessels—cups, as Yamada would insist on calling them. At the exhibition’s opening, all these cups were mostly the same. The vessels were created during Yamada’s time as an artist-in-residence for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and though they were created using a mold, each subtlety marks its difference, along with a unique label. The cups were handmade but on an assembly line, as part of Yamada’s navigation of handmaking and industrialism, which we will explore more later. For now, I want to note a few things.

At Cup Exchange, visitors lined up outside the galleries in anticipation of swapping out their mugs with one of the artist’s. Yamada’s vessels now pervade the Twin Cities, and perhaps parts beyond, with new owners. What interests me is the artist’s insistence of the use of the word “cup” for what would generally be called a mug. Cups are vital to our everyday existence as drinking vessels, but that particular name is not limited to how it operates as an object. Cupping is also a physical motion we can do with our hands. It is this connection that discloses the care element present in Yamada’s work. We “cup” our cups, but we also cup the faces of our loved ones in our hands as we kiss their foreheads and wipe away their tears.

Speaking of physical motions we do with our hands, let’s contemplate Waiting. The original piece was a “waiting hut” inspired by a chashitsu, an architectural space used during Japanese tea ceremonies; it also bears some resemblance to a Japanese bus stop. Constructed in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and situated in the Hmong Town Marketplace, it operated as an art installation but also a gathering space during a time when it was difficult to be in community. Every week Yamada would pin drawings of mudras, hand motions used in Hinduism and other religions for meditative purposes, to the walls. The re-creation for Listening included the same material used in the original—homasote, a cheap building and soundproofing material, and framed drawings of the mudras.

As the artist constructed the original piece, the city of Minneapolis was rocked by the murder of George Floyd. According to the curators, the artist intended for Waiting to be used as a space for healing in the wake of the pandemic and those events. The drawings of mudras are labeled with all that waiting is for the artist: being, listening, feeling watching, thinking, healing, to prepare for action, to dream about tomorrow, to wait for the storm to pass. Each word or phrase is paired with its own mudra, and the final mudra encourages the viewer to wait “here” on the bench built into the space. Amid the social uprisings and widespread uncertainty about the future, it felt and continues to feel impossible, even torturous, merely to wait. This work presents the idea that not only can waiting be a source of healing if done with intention, but also that healing can be brought through the hands, whether you follow the rhythms of the mudras yourself, or just take in their power through the drawings.

Those works bring our attention to the care Yamada takes with his work and shows for his audience. With Everyday City, the artist asks viewers to consider handmaking in a futuristic sense, and how care could adapt under the pressures of productivity. Made following his Kohler residency, Everyday City contain 821 hand-thrown vessels—cups, plates, platters, bowls, vases, etc.—stacked atop a wood-and-metal table, forming a cityscape.

In this piece, we navigate the impulse of care and the handmade in the unlikely environment of industrialization. During his most productive days, Yamada threw up to 80 pieces a day. Having worked in an environment focused on mass production, he set up an assembly line in his workspace. Such productivity allowed Yamada to create an entire world with his art. The piece is surreal: it dips into something not of this world and pulls it into our reality. By unfastening mass production from its direct relationship to commerce and deploying it as a means of world-building, Yamada forces viewers to question care as that which exists solely between individuals and encourages thoughts about the flexibility of care. Could it be expansive enough to reach what only exists in our imaginations?

The magic of hands is in the power they hold to pass our lifeforce into materials, inanimate objects that touch the hearts of those who experience them. In Listening, Yamada executes this magic in calm and subtle gestures that leave powerful impressions on his viewers. May the next thing we touch, hold, make, or create be imbued with that same power.▪︎

Experience Tetsuya Yamada: Listening for yourself at the Walker from January 18–July 7, 2024.