In Tomohiro Suzuki’s studio, test pieces sit alongside a thick notebook filled with the results of years of experimentation. He studies the slightest variations in how blue decoration bleeds through an Annande glaze, yet deliberately leaves small stones in raw clay when they add something to the finished surface. His work is not about controlling every detail, but understanding when to intervene—and when to let the material speak for itself. “Somewhere between these two,” he says of two test results. It is in that space, between intention and uncertainty, that Suzuki continues to work.
At Tomohiro Suzuki’s studio, he handed me a test piece.
Blue lines ran across a pale glazed surface. At first, the differences were easy to miss. In one section, the line remained crisp. In another, the blue had softened slightly into the glaze. Elsewhere, it had spread further, its edges almost dissolving.
Suzuki was testing Annande, a style known for the gentle bleeding of its painted decoration.
A clean, sharp line was not necessarily a successful one. The blue needed to blur—but only slightly. Too little, and the surface lost the character he was looking for. Too much, and it became something else.
None of the tests in front of us was quite right.
He compared two of them for a moment.
“Somewhere between these two,” he said.
What he wanted did not yet exist.
Later, Suzuki pulled out a thick notebook.
It contained records of his previous tests: changing conditions, firing again, looking at the result, then adjusting and trying once more.
The sight of it immediately reminded me of graduate school.
“It feels like doing experiments,” I told him.
I had always imagined pottery as a largely intuitive practice: clay in the hands, experience stored in the body, decisions made by touch.
There was certainly intuition in Suzuki’s work. But behind it was something far more methodical than I had expected.
A slight difference in the way blue spreads through a glaze can be enough to begin another test.
To me, the variations were subtle. To Suzuki, they were not the same.
Then he showed me another piece.
Small stones from the raw clay were still visible in its surface. One pushed gently against the skin of the vessel, leaving a small rise in the clay.
They could have been removed.
For some of his work, Suzuki chooses to leave them.
The contrast stayed with me.
With the Annande tests, he was searching for an extraordinarily precise degree of imperfection—a line that blurred, but not too much. Yet elsewhere, he was willing to leave a stone exactly where the earth had placed it.
It was not simply a matter of making everything cleaner, smoother or more controlled.
Some things required another intervention.
Others became more interesting when the hand stopped.
On another shelf was a hand-built matcha bowl priced at ¥12,000.
It was more expensive than many of Suzuki’s other pieces, and customers sometimes asked why.
The answer was in the process.
Unlike his wheel-thrown work, the bowl was built by hand. The form had to be made gradually, left to rest, then hollowed out before further surface work could begin.
None of that time was particularly visible in the finished bowl.
To a customer, ¥12,000 is not a small amount to spend on a tea bowl.
To the person making it, however, it may still not be enough to make such a labour-intensive process worth repeating.
I asked what would happen if I wanted to order one.
“I might not make them,” Suzuki said.
Perhaps, he added, I could simply buy one when he happened to make another.
There was something unexpectedly matter-of-fact about his answer.
Not everything that can be made needs to become a regular product. Not everything people want to buy needs to be reproduced on demand.
After leaving the studio, I kept thinking about the Annande tests.
“Somewhere between these two.”
Suzuki had been talking about the slightest movement of blue through a glaze. But the phrase seemed to describe something larger in his work.
There are things a maker can control, and things that clay and fire will decide for themselves.
Too much intervention can erase what makes a material interesting. Too little may never bring an idea into being.
The work happens somewhere between the two.
Suzuki’s thick notebook is a record of that search: not for a formula that will make clay completely predictable, but for a better understanding of when to intervene and when to leave something alone.
Fire it once.
Look again.
If it is not quite there, try again.
After years of making, there are still things he does not fully know.
Perhaps that is precisely why there is still something worth making.
