‘Draped Moments,’ a solo exhibition by Katie Strachan, was presented from July 18 to September 20, 2025. SUCHSIZE, the exhibition space, describes itself as follows: “We are an Open Art Lab, built around the theme of  ‘living as oneself with art.’ We explore, from an artistic perspective, the forms and materials brought forth by nature’s cycles and seek to share the insights with society.” The gallery is housed in a renovated former residence, where the layered memories of past inhabitants intersect with the vibrant contemporary experiences generated through the ongoing activities of this Open Art Lab. 

Many of Strachan’s artworks, primarily ceramics, embody the passage of time through  overlapping, draped layers. Their thinness evokes fragility and dissolution, while also suggesting a sense of lastingness contained within the moment of disappearance. These qualities resonated deeply with the distinctive character of the venue, coming together to form a conceptual concerto.

Through this exhibition, SUCHSIZE aimed to illuminate the core ideas of Strachan’s practice by drawing parallels between her works and the Japanese patchwork tradition known as boro. The following statement outlines the curatorial direction.

 

More than patched cloth and repurposed fabric scraps, boro textiles carry the imprint of multi-generational family ties and the embodied presence of the hands that stitched and mended them. Each layer bears quiet yet powerful traces of inheritance and care. Echoing this sentiment, the work of Katie Strachan reflects on the transience of time, the transmission of memory, and the impulse to leave something behind in the face of inevitable change.

 

Boro refers to a type of repaired textile, including kimonos or futons, made by piecing together or sometimes embroidering old garments. These textiles, traditionally used by farmers in the cold northeastern regions of Japan, emerged at a time when fabric was scarce and precious. Worn or damaged fabrics had to be mended and layered through repeated stitching for continued use. The accumulation of such daily actions over generations gave rise to boro pieces that embody the memories of those who have lived—and continue to live—with them. Although Strachan’s works are not directly inspired by boro, their juxtaposition in the exhibition highlights shared ideas of time, memory, impermanence, and materiality. These connections deepen our understanding of Strachan’s practice, in which draped forms, cracks, powdered soil, and diverse materials reveal the passage of time in a richly layered manner.

In an interview, Strachan remarked: “In my artistic practice, I aim to encapsulate the essence of human experience through relics and manuscripts,” adding that “what remains significant is the layers within each piece, which symbolize the passage of time akin to tree rings. Given the fragility inherent in life, symbolized by the delicate layers of my sculptures, I utilize wax through the encaustic technique to preserve these relics.” [1] Strachan traces the origin of her practice to the Fraktur tradition created by German immigrants in Pennsylvania, USA, where she grew up. Using uniquely decorated Fraktur letters, these manuscripts record personal events, such as births, deaths, and religious faith. They stand as testimonies to human existence in the world.

Strachan’s artworks, however, do not directly draw from the decorative qualities of Fraktur. Rather, Fraktur can also be understood as a means of bearing witness to life and death: to affirm that one was born, lived with the support of others, and died, while carrying that memory into the future. Strachan’s practice can be seen as a response to this human condition. The recurring elements in her work, such as embodied memory and the passing of time, are realized through the medium of clay, which she places at the center of her practice. Ceramics involve multi-layered time, and the drapes in Strachan’s works, made from thin clay, can be interpreted as a careful incorporation of this layered temporality into her pieces.

Perhaps the most frequently cited observation regarding the relationship between time and ceramics is that clay attains a kind of a kind of durable permanence through the firing process. The oldest known ceramic object, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice from the Czech Republic, is estimated to be about 28,000 years old. In Japan, earthenware excavated from the Odai Yamamoto archaeological sites in Aomori dates back roughly 16,000 years. Many contemporary artists are drawn to clay for this very reason: its capacity to preserve form across vast spans of time. The impression of “relics” often arises from this inherent material quality. At the same time, ceramics are fragile—easily broken, losing their original shape—and this fact reveals a tension between endurance and destruction that lies at the heart of the medium itself.

We must note, however, that temporality in ceramics is not confined to its immediate material transformation. It also resides in the temporality of clay itself. Clay is drawn from strata that are thousands to several million years old. In Japan, such clays are weathered granites—rocks that have decomposed through the slow actions of water, wind, and microorganisms over unfathomable spans of time, and accumulated in what were once lakebeds. Before becoming a material, clay already functions as a record of vanished landscapes, bringing lost scenes to light and inviting us to imagine them. In this sense, if time could be manifested as a tangible object or relic, perceptible through our bodily senses and experience, then unformed clay would carry a timeline that extends far beyond our own.

The act of firing clay, a substance that carries such immense temporality, alters our conception of time itself. Firing introduces an alternative timeline, distinct from the linear flow of past, present, and future. Ceramics is often described as the transformation of earth into stone. While firing does turn clay into “stone,” granting it a form of material endurance, the process can also be understood as an artificial reversal of time—a counteraction to the geological cycle in which rock erodes and decomposes into clay over millennia. Seen within a timescale that exceeds human existence, we may even imagine the eventual dissolution of all things.

From these perspectives, firing can be understood as a process that transforms clay through the interplay between natural earth and fired ceramics. It deconstructs the clay’s inherent temporality and accelerates time toward a realm where permanence and erosion coexist. At the same time, creating ceramic works through firing can be seen as an act of transforming the vast timeline embedded within the clay into a temporal space shaped by human experience. This is why Strachan’s fragile ceramic drapes—which embody experience and memory—serve as a symbol of life’s transience, guiding the viewer’s attention to the temporal dimension that lies between human perception and what transcends it. 

As mentioned earlier, Strachan remarks that she aims “to encapsulate the essence of human experience through relics and manuscripts,” and that “artworks are not merely objects; they can serve as gateways to different perceptions of time, like relics” [2]. These statements help explain why her delicate ceramic works achieve such solidity of expression. The deep, layered temporality that makes ceramics possible lies at the very core of Strachan’s practice. Her works become points of reflection on the traces of our ancestors—passed down through generations and embedded beneath our feet—preserving them as memories, much like the Fraktur manuscripts that once recorded lives and beliefs.

In other words, what Strachan refers to as “relics” are not merely objects of the past, but the past as it continues into the living present, allowing us to actively engage with them to discover new meanings. In this sense, the works in this exhibition, though evoking fragility, search for a sense of lastingness within human life, with time and memory as their guiding threads.

 

1. Cf. Exhibition ~2025 summer~《Draped Moments》ONLINE CATALOG.

2. Ibid.

 

Tomohiro Daicho

Chief Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Until April 2017, he served as a curator at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum. His research encompasses modern and contemporary crafts, exploring both the meanings found in the process of making objects and those embodied in the finished objects. He has organized numerous exhibitions based on this ongoing research. Exhibitions he has curated at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, include: ‘THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE MEIJI PERIOD: Making and Designing Meiji Arts and Crafts’ (2018), ‘Potter Kawai Kanjiro: Works from the Kawakatsu Collection’ (2019), ‘MORIGUCHI Kunihiko: Yuzen / Design – Crossroads of Creativity’ (2020), ‘A Chronicle of Modern Crafts: Works from the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto Collection’ (2021), ‘KIYOMIZU Kyubey / Rokubey VII Retrospective’ (2022), ‘The Sodeisha Group: An Era Born Out of Avant-garde Ceramics’ (2023), ‘Kuroda Tatsuaki: A Journey Through Wood, Lacquer, and Mother-of-Pearl’ (2024), and ‘Secrets of the Kimono: The Advent of Yuzen Dyeing’ (2025).

 

Translated by Taiyo Wada

 

Editor (English) by Mary Lou DAVID