Kazuma
Ishikawa
, Kanazawa
The Story
Kazuma Tominaga grew up in Osaka and studied sculpture at Osaka University of Arts, graduating in 2010. It was there that glass first presented itself as the right material for the work he envisioned, one capable of holding accident and intention simultaneously in a way that no other medium quite allowed. After years of independent practice, he undertook a residency at the Kanazawa Utatsuyama Craft Workshop from 2017 to 2020, a period of sustained daily creation that crystallized his approach to glass as a discipline of sustained observation.
In 2020, he joined Toyama Institute of Glass Art as an assistant instructor and settled in Nanto, a city in the southern mountains of Toyama where the winters bring deep snow and the landscape retains the character of a place that has largely resisted modernity. The surrounding region, home to the World Heritage village of Gokayama and touched by the mingei folk craft movement of the early twentieth century, provided a quieter, slower context for an art practice that depends on looking carefully at the world around you.
Kazuma’s guiding principle is connection: between materials, between observed moments, between the texture of daily life and the objects that can be made if you pay attention to it. “I want to find connections between the things that surround me,” he says. That attention is both his subject and his method.
The Craft
Kazuma works with blown glass, kiln forming, and cold working techniques, moving between these processes as each piece demands. What distinguishes his work is a specific relationship to accident: the bubble that forms unexpectedly, the surface that shifts under heat, the moment the material does something he did not plan. Rather than correcting these he absorbs them as information, letting the object’s behavior redirect the work. This requires a patience rare in studio practice — a willingness to follow rather than lead, allowing the art to bring the artist to the final form.
Selected works
