Reach the next hold. Fire the next piece.
Granite Crest Zone opened in October 2014 in a 90-year-old textile warehouse on Omiya-dori in Kyoto's Nishijin district. Haruki Nishimura had spent the previous year converting the space himself. Pulling out the old loom frames, pouring a new concrete floor with a slight drain slope, wiring three 200-volt circuits for the electric kilns. The name came from a climbing route he had attempted three times on the granite faces of Mount Mizugaki in Yamanashi, a route that demands patience and commitment in equal measure. He thought ceramics demanded the same.
Reach the next hold. Fire the next piece.
Haruki Nishimura trained under Kenji Aoyama at the Bizen Pottery Institute in Okayama for six years before relocating to Kyoto in 2013 to apprentice with Tomoko Sato, whose reduction-fired stoneware is held in three prefectural collections. In 2014 he opened Granite Crest Zone in a converted textile warehouse in Kyoto's Nishijin district, convinced that ceramics should be taught with the same forward momentum that climbing a rock face demands: commit to the next hold, trust the arc, land clean. He fires two wood-burning anagama kilns per year and keeps every beginner class capped at six students so nobody gets lost in the crowd. Outside the studio he runs trail routes through the Kitayama hills most Saturday mornings and believes that the rhythm of a long run and the rhythm of centring clay on a wheel are, in the end, the same thing.