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Where I Live | Lynne Yamaguchi, Arizona

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Where I Live  |  Lynne Yamaguchi, Arizona
Walnut, tulipwood, bleached alder, rosewood, mahogany, purpleheart, satinwood, chakte kok, cherry, oak | 6 x 5.5 x 5.5 in/15 x 14 x 14 cm

Where I Live
1.
Bowls. Elemental
vessels. What is body but
a bowl of self;
head, heart, hands:
soul shell.

2.
Bowls are family at the table,
heritage shared, umami
from my mother’s mother’s hands.
They are Japanese, like me.

3.
Where I live, it’s spring.
From ground fertile with logs sprout
these flowers, wood, wild.


About the Artist: Lynne Yamaguchi has exhibited her artwork and taught woodturning throughout the United States. "Much of what I bring to turning comes from my Japanese heritage: the philosophy of practice, a worldview that sees wood as an expression of living energy, an aesthetic that embraces the humble and the elegant. My sense of form comes directly from Japanese pottery, enduring as memory in my hands. My heritage is genetic too: I come from a family of artists.

In addition, as a writer, and editor, I’ve learned the art of cutting. I believe as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said in Wind, Sand and Stars: “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away.” For me, in woodturning, perfection is an expression of the wood’s essential nature, flaws and all, and one’s ability to embody the perfection present in each chunk of wood must be honed as sharp as any gouge.

One final thread: the idea of home. I have found two homes in my life, one in Kyoto, the other in the desert Southwest. Each nurtures different, even opposite, aspects of my nature. In Kyoto, I remember balance and am steeped in a cellular appreciation of beauty. In the Arizona desert, my spirit remembers wildness and soars in sun. Somehow—through the wildness of the wood and the discipline of the art—woodturning brings me home to both."

Learn more: http://lynneyamaguchi.com