Kamae, Kazumi
Japan, 1966
After graduating from high school, Kazumi participated in Atelier Yamanami in 1985. Not confident in her words and actions, she had a hard time telling others what she wanted to do or to express her feelings and desire with words. Both she and people around her were struggling for a long time to decide what’s best for Kazumi. One day, Kazumi fell in love with a man. She learned the joy of expressing her own feelings with clay, being encouraged or briefly commented on by him. From this, she became more confident of herself little by little and was able to actively communicate with someone she loved and other people through creating and presenting her own work. At the beginning of her creation, she made a foundation with clay. She then makes clay pellets roughly the size of grain of rice with her fingers and attaches them to the surface of the foundation. It takes her roughly two months to cover the entire foundation with numerous pellets. While Kazumi’s primary motivation is to gain the attention of the person she loves by creating his statues, her imagination has expanded lately and she now creates various virtual scenes featuring the person she loves (Masato) and herself.
