Minami Ikeya　池谷三奈美

Ikeya’s atelier and home stands in a residential neighborhood situated between Kichijoji and Musashino. Ikeya both grew up and continues to produce glassworks in this area where the passage of time is slightly more relaxed compared to the bustle of Tokyo’s city center. Although the scope of her practice is gradually expanding, she maintains a certain calmness and composure, engaging with glass at her own pace while cherishing encounters and relationships with others that naturally come to manifest. Ikeya often gains her inspiration from old things. Showing a glass plate made in Hungary that she had found at an antique market, she mentioned how she too wishes to create works in which a sense of newness could be felt amidst the nostalgic.

Ikeya’s glassworks are made in an entirely different way from blown-glass that is recognized as the so-called the mainstream of glass production. In her method she arranges cut pieces of sheet glass in a plaster mold, allowing the glass to melt and take on the shape of the mold as it is heated in an electric kiln. This step of “bending the glass” is an important and complex point within the production process, requiring much experience and intuition in determining the optimal temperature and timing. Ikeya had originally studied glassmaking at university. Despite having experience working with blown-glass, she proceeded to polish her skills centering on kiln work, as the almost sports-like nature of blown-glass that required swift adjustments by the second had disagreed with her style and approach. Ikeya’s works brilliantly overturn preconceptions towards glass vessels as being thin, transparent, and smooth. Works with variously colored glass are at times opaque and uneven in texture, and also harboring a certain air of nostalgia, permeate with a pleasantly liberating atmosphere that is not bound to conventional ideas or formats.

Currently, Ikeya newly engages in producing works using waste materials. She takes old pieces of figured glass that have been discarded as waste materials from demolished houses in an effort to transform them into new vessels and glassworks. Figured glass engraved with various patterns had often been used in Japanese houses in the past, yet today such landscapes are gradually becoming obsolete. Ikeya is able to create works that make use of these patterns due to her means of production that allows the glass not to entirely melt. While the reuse of architectural waste materials tend to bring to mind things a large scale such as interior fittings and furniture, her works enable us to realize how according to one’s perspective it can be used in a much smaller and intimate context. Ikeya expresses her hopes for artists not only working with glass, but also in other genres like woodwork and metalwork to incorporate and successfully revive old materials in order to maintain a good and efficient cycle.