Eri Maeda

Artist Statement

Eri Maeda is a ceramic sculptor working through her own journey. Raised in Japan within a difficult family and a strict, high control belief system, she went to strict schools and spent years under social pressure as a woman, arriving at adulthood full of problems that had no name. Japan was comfortable to live in, but hard to exist in. France is harder to live in, but there she can exist.

Her practice draws on Japanese yokai and yaoyorozu no kami traditions, and her background in advertising, which taught her how consumer culture sells fixes for problems it creates.

Maeda turns ordinary objects into monsters, because ordinary life is full of rules and pressures most people carry silently. A mirror becomes a mouth, and looking into it means being swallowed. A comb's teeth become real teeth, catching what passes through them. Her sculptures provoke conversation around mental illness and feminism, so people who have carried something similar feel seen and less alone.

She works in clay because clay is forgiving. Every push, every layer, every mistake, it accepts. What draws her most is the firing process. Fire is a symbol of power and anger to her, and her own struggle and anger are what ignite the work. The monsters go through fire and come out stronger.

Her monsters scream what she could not say as a child. This is her revenge.