Tajimi Custom Tiles, the new brand based in Tajimi, the historic center of the Japanese tile industry, creates custom-tailored tiles in collaboration with Max Lamb and Kwangho Lee.
In 'Working Title', Max Lamb showcases what makes Tajimi a unique manufacturing location and what TCT hopes to achieve. He designed a set of modular, 3-dimensional tiles that can create countless shapes, with the resulting objects performing as vases, sofas, tables, benches or partition walls. He used typical clays with characteristic earthy attributes, and special glazes with ambiguous colours harkening to classic Japanese with tiles. His production method is pressure moulding which allows highly-precise 3-dimensional shapes and patterns.
'Tide' by Kwanghoh Lee was inspired by one of the typical production methods in Tajimi – the clay extrusion. He created a module with a section in the form of a looped line, that can be extruded to different lengths in order to assume different functions. The modules can be stacked horizontally or vertically to form various basic objects, like walls or benches. When the modules are aligned, the repeated loop has an almost hand-drawn quality, creating patterns reminiscent of knitted fabric.“ Knitting” has been an important theme in Kwangho’s work, and he has explored it often in different materials and on diverse scales. In his work with tiles, Kwangho’s knitting theme creates references to the varying states of clay, from initially soft and malleable to ultimately hard and fixed.
