31. Kitamura Junko  北村 純子

Kitamura Junko was born in Kyoto in 1956. She studied at Kyoto City University of Art, where she was taught by Suzuki Osamu, one of the founders of the influential avant-garde group Sodeisha, among others. Kitamura was inspired as a child by the paintings of her father, an abstract painter, and Kyoto's rich textile industry, where she could see up close the dyeing of fabrics using stamps. It would lead to a passion that she would also carry through into her ceramic work, whose designs are reminiscent of the textile painting of her hometown. It is characterized by intricate, undulating patterns of tiny dots and geometric shapes meticulously cut from the dark clay with a homemade bamboo gouge and then inlaid with creamy white sludge, a technique that harkens back to the ancient 15th-century Korean tradition of punch'ong pottery with slip-inlay.  Kitamura Junko has won several prestigious awards, including the Kyoto Selective Exhibitions of Arts and Crafts and the Varazdin Prize of the World Triennial Exhibition of Small Ceramics in Zagreb. Her work is in many public collections, including the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the British Museum in London, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.