AYAKO
ROKKAKU
Presence
as
Method
Mallorca, Spring/Summer 2024 by Danaï Loukas
Ayako Rokkaku in dialogue with Mallorca’s history, knowledge, and modes of making.
Ayako Rokkaku in dialogue
with Mallorca’s history, knowledge,
and modes of making.
In the spring of 2024, Ayako Rokkaku spent several months in Mallorca as an artist-in-residence at CCA Andratx. Situated within the island’s mountainous landscape and shared with an international community of artists, the residency offered a spatial and temporal framework in which her practice could unfold at a new pace. Open courtyards, shifting Mediterranean light, and the surrounding terrain formed a setting that encouraged sustained attention to material, rhythm, and process.
Life at CCA Andratx extended well beyond the studio. Rokkaku’s days unfolded through long conversations with other residents, walks through the surrounding landscape, and a growing familiarity with the island’s daily rhythms. She moved between rugged hills and cultivated gardens, spent time in local vermouth bars, ate tapas, and observed how social life takes shape through repeated, understated rituals. She also became attentive to the residency’s cat, whose unhurried presence across studios and courtyards subtly shaped the atmosphere of daily life. These new habits became part of the temporal and experiential framework in which the work developed, anchoring the residency in lived presence rather than retreat.
As in each place where she works, Rokkaku approached Mallorca not as a backdrop but as a context to be absorbed through presence. This attentiveness led her toward one of the island’s most deeply rooted material traditions: ceramics. Following a lineage of artists who have engaged local craft practices as a form of material thinking, she turned to ceramics as a way of entering into dialogue with the island’s history, knowledge, and modes of making.
After several visits to Gerreria Pere Coll, Rokkaku began working with ceramics directly, shaping the material by hand without preparatory drawings or molds. The immediacy of the medium aligned closely with her sculptural language. Gradually, familiar hybrid figures emerged—forms that exist between animal, human, and imagined presence. Pressed, pinched, and shaped through direct contact, the works retain visible traces of touch, adjustment, and reworking.
Gerreria Pere Coll is located in the village of Pòrtol, one of Mallorca’s historic centers of ceramic production. Rooted in a long lineage of local craft, the workshop has traditionally produced ceramics for domestic, architectural, and decorative use. Its terracotta works are shaped from regional material using established techniques and fired with an emphasis on durability, texture, and material warmth.
The workshop privileges continuity over innovation. Forms are hand-thrown or hand-built, fired slowly, and finished with minimal surface intervention. Objects bear the marks of manual labor and accumulated time rather than industrial refinement. The space itself—defined by kilns, drying shelves, molds, and ceramic-covered tools—embodies a rhythm of making that is grounded, functional, and inseparable from place.
Within this environment, Rokkaku produced a ceramic installation composed of thirty-six individual elements, each varying in scale, posture, and form. While autonomous, the figures operate collectively, forming an installation that oscillates between cohesion and fragmentation. The work reflects an exchange between Rokkaku’s established visual language and the specific material and cultural conditions encountered in Mallorca.
This body of work attests to the kind of cultural dialogue that emerges through sustained presence and shared practice. The Mediterranean climate, the tactile qualities of the ceramic material, and the rhythms of workshop production subtly inflected Rokkaku’s approach, extending her sculptural vocabulary without displacing it.
The ceramic installation was first presented in Mallorca as part of Rokkaku’s solo exhibition HOLDING AN ISLAND at CCA Andratx. It is now shown in SCENERY IN THE PROCESS OF BEING FORMED at KÖNIG GALERIE in Berlin, alongside works developed in Venice, Porto, Seoul, and Berlin itself. Together, these works trace Rokkaku’s ongoing method of working—one grounded in immersion, duration, and attentiveness—through which place, material, and lived experience quietly shape the evolution of her practice.
