Fremont Project

In the spring of 1992 Jun Kaneko began what was then perhaps the largest clay project ever undertaken by a single artist. It had been nearly ten years since his Omaha Project, and Kaneko once again had secured access to enormous industrial kilns, this time at Mission Clay Products in Fremont, California. Mission Clay’s kilns were normally used to produce terra-cotta sewage pipes, but Brian Vansell, manager of the factory and an ceramicist himself, invited Kaneko to use their enormous beehive kilns as part of Mission Clay’s artist residency program. Kaneko decided to construct twenty five dangos with a careful process that would require two kilns and two and a half years. 

Kaneko first spent a few years researching all of the fundamental elements of  engineering and chemistry relevant to the project, filling more than twenty notebooks, before he set out for California. Two semi trucks transported his equipment and supplies from Omaha, including a clay mixer, forty tons of dry clay body, scaffolding, and specially designed forklifts. Kaneko and three assistants worked tirelessly from May to August, mixing an average of five hundred pounds of clay per day and carefully building Kaneko’s dangos, which ranged in size from five to eleven and a half feet.

However, when the construction of the largest dangos was nearly complete, a serious problem was discovered: as they dried, the dangos were cracking at their bases, succumbing to the pressure of the immense weight of their walls. Perplexed but undeterred, Kaneko and his assistants destroyed all six dangos, hammering down the tons of dried clay to be slaked and remixed. Then they started again.

For Kaneko, the Fremont project was about experimentation and learning, and he was determined to find a solution to the cracking. After extensive evaluation and consultations with experts he realized that, because no one had ever attempted ceramics at this scale, no one could advise him on what to do differently. “All this information from experts didn’t help me,”

One day, as his assistants were taking down dangos with sledgehammers, Kaneko spoke on the telephone with his friend Goro Suzuki in Japan. Suzuki understood the questions, but had never made monolithic shapes like Kaneko’s and did not know how to solve the problem. But he told Kaneko, “I know when you make a teapot in Japan, before you trim, you tap the bottom up a bit, a reverse dome. If we do that, we never lose one. When you make this reverse dome, you have a cushion, and it can escape the tension of uneven shrinkage.”  Kaneko incorporated this advice into the second construction of his dangos.

Reconstructing the dangos took only five weeks on the second attempt, because, according to Kaneko, “We learned so much stuff from the first disaster, how to move everything, that we could go faster.”  The second construction of the dangos was a success, and after eighteen months of drying they were ready for their first bisque firing, which, for the largest dangos, took and additional seven weeks. Glazing and a second firing followed, and in September 1994 the kilns were opened to great triumph and celebration.