Japanese ceramic artist Shiho Hayashi born in Kobe in 1984, studied lacquer craft at Kyoto University of Arts, and currently lives and works in Tajimi City, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. Looking back on her 10-year ceramic career, Hayashi explains her approach to her works, which she has been consistently working on since the beginning of her artistic life, not as a prayer or expectation for an object, but as a sense of invisible existence, as a formative object that is not limited to human form, "Perhaps I create them as a kind of DOGU in the modern age.

Hayashi's work begins with the random unevenness created by stamping a flattened clay slab against a natural stone. The process is neither an abstraction of a motif nor an embodiment of natural beauty. Hayashi's works, which are the realization of an abstract image of the feeling of life from the continuous "circulation of feeling" through the clay from random unevenness to an artificially formed object, are works of art that contain coincidences that are difficult for even the artist herself to reproduce.

The original experience that serves as the starting point for her work is the view of life and death that she felt through her childhood experience of the Earthquake. Also, her interest in the human body was influenced by her father, who is a doctor. Her approach to the "feel of life" was fostered through her eye on nature through mountain climbing and trekking, which have been close to her since childhood.

Hayashi's style, which she says was influenced by the ambivalence and view of life and death (beauty and humor, but at the same time eeriness) of the works of Japanese ceramic artist Keiji Ito and French artist Annette Messager, is gently expanding its territory while overlapping Hayashi's own personal view of the human body and nature. The presence of rawness felt in a moment of beauty, and the sense of touching to try to understand the unknowable, is one of the physical qualities we would like to regain in this age of fictionalized reality on the other side of the screen.