The Botanical Sculptures of Hitomi Hosono

We really love the incredible ceramic sculptures designed by Japanese Kanazawa College of Art Bachelor graduate Hitomi Hosono. After complementary studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the graduation of a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London Hosono has perfected her craft and creates one of a kind botanical ceramic sculptures. The proces of creating her artworks roughly breaks down as follows; firstly it takes one month to create the mold, three intense weeks follow to attach the folliage, and it lastly takes up to five months to let the sculptures dry. The now London-based artist’s lifelike depictions of leafage were recently awarded with a Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize, a new award officiated by the producer of Champagne from the French Épernay region.

Hitomi Hosono creates her wonderfully detailed sculptures all from memory, particularly, from the time spent on a farm in Gifu where she observed lots of greenery as a child. Because of her photographic memory a lot of the then seen plants have found a place in her imagination. The visual images the artist bears in her memory are so vast that she’ll often forget where they are from although a majority seem to be from the mentioned time at the farm in Gifu. When interviewed Hosono has confessed:

I’ll send my mother a sketch and ask her if she knows what the flower is and she’ll say: We have it in our garden, don’t you remember?

The dedication and craftsmanship of Hosono is exceptional which shows through the fact that before each leaf or bud is placed, it has to be fine-tuned using dentists’ tools. This process takes as mentioned three weeks in which the artist works around the clock with few breaks. She states: “Otherwise, with the replication, the detail can fall away. This is the core of my work, really. Each one has to be perfect.”

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