Blue Utakata Container

Glass artist Yuko Sekino meticulously crafts her works in her studio in Tanba-Sasayama, Hyogo Prefecture. With her refined aesthetic sensibility, Yuko pays careful attention to every detail of design and form, continuously creating works that harmonize with people’s living spaces and lifestyles.

The piece “Ao no Utakata,” or “Blue Utakata,” is the culmination of a long quest to express in glass the blue hue of celadon, a color she has long admired, creating the bright blue color by wrapping copper foil around the glass surface. Shades of black, variations in color intensity, and flowing patterns fortuitously emerging on the glass surface from those overlapping copper foils all combine with the frothy expression of glass created through a unique glassblowing technique to reveal a profound world.

This spherical container, shining in blue, appears like a photo of the Earth viewed from the sky. As its name suggests, this work, in which changes in the glass beyond the control of artifice are captured and refined by the artist’s skillful techniques, is full of ephemeral beauty and charm.