Columns

In 2014, nearly twenty-five years after his first artist residency at Mission Clay Products, Jun Kaneko began his third project with the company. Mission Clay is an industrial terracotta pipe manufacturer with locations in Fremont, California, Pittsburg, Kansas, and Phoenix, Arizona. Kaneko used Mission Clay’s facilities and kilns in Fremont and Pittsburg to construct enormous ceramic heads and dangos in the preceding decades, and for his third residency, he went to Mission Clay’s worksite in Phoenix.

For this project, Kaneko was intrigued at the notion of using the company’s product itself as a medium for his creative vision. What could he do with one hundred clay sewer pipes, each standing thirteen feet tall?  Kaneko transformed the pipes into an array of brightly colored, striped columns. With this new shape, Kaneko had another opportunity to challenge his creativity by working with manufactured terracotta forms. Having no plan for what to do with them once they were finished, he gave way to his curiosity and transformed the columns into art.

Once the columns were constructed, they were dried and glazed, without the step of bisque firing. Nine columns at a time could be fired in the center of the immense beehive kiln, and that same number is all that would fit on a semi-truck bed for their journey to Omaha. Upon arrival, they were arranged in Kaneko’s studio until a private collector purchased thirty-eight of them for their sculpture garden, commissioning Kaneko to design their installation. Several more columns are also installed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus in Omaha.