Akiko Jackson’s Where Do We Go When We Open the Heart? is a meditation on grief, love, and the complexities of vulnerability. Through black clay coils that echo braided hair and maternal care, Jackson explores the tension between strength and fragility. A gilded, kintsugi-inspired wall anchors the accompanying sculptures, asking: Can we honor brokenness without fetishizing pain? Can love gather in the cracks of imperfection?
Artist Statement: "Sometimes I question if the relief we get from the arts is enough to hold ourselves. Against the backdrop of generational grief, genocide, and injustice, the studio can feel like a fragile shelter from the scale of global suffering. What does a sculpture do in the face of that? And yet, I return–again and again–to the slow labor of touch. Even in helplessness, this work becomes a way of being present. It is a place where silence becomes form, and where memory becomes material.
I work with a black clay body I’ve formulated to meet both the conceptual and structural needs of the work. It is dense, unforgiving, and carries weight–like the emotional terrain I navigate in the process. Long coils echo the braiding of long black hair: a reference to maternal lineage, care, to repetition, and the intimacy of tending.
Each fingerprint pressed into the clay serves as both residue and record–a tactile language where my verbal expression often falls short. When displacement severs ties to land, lineage, and inherited language, the body becomes the archive. The gesture becomes the inheritance.
Building at an embodied scale feels both necessary and impossible. Gravity pulls form downward as I build upward–a tension that mirrors the vulnerability of trying to remain open in a world that teaches us to close. The sculptures resist collapse through repetition and care, but the strain remains visible. The labor is not hidden. BY tracing a kind of ghosted presence of love–offered, imagined, or lost–I try to allow absence to function not as a void, but as a generative site where cultural dislocation, mourning, and memory coalesce.
My mother, born in Japan, lives separated from the family she left behind. Through the geography of homeland remains, it is no longer a place of return to family. I explore what it means to inherit culture through fragments: gestures, stories, textures, materials. Body and stone recur as metaphors: hair as lineage and feminine labor, referencing the tradition of braiding stories across generations; ceramic as rootedness and weight, evoking both permanence and the burden of cultural silence. I’m interested in how ancestral practices adapt in the face of rupture–how we carry what we cannot name, how we tend to what was interrupted.
I try to let myself be held by something ancient and slow–like memory braided through clay.
Once fired and naked, the clay remembers everything. It can no longer be reshaped–only held, or broken. I gilded accent wall referencing kintsgui–the Japanese tradition of mending broken ceramic with gold–serves not to idealize fracture, but to asl:
How do we confront brokenness without fetishizing the wound?
Can love gather in the cracks of imperfection?
Can we?
Is healing a truth, or a beautifully necessary illusion?
Maybe both.
Where do we go when we open the heart?
Maybe we remain–
Suspended in the breath between breaking and being held.
Her hands are in mine when I work.”
Bio: Akiko Jackson is from Kahuku, a rural north shore community on the island of O'ahu, Hawai’i. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts and an MA from California State University - Northridge, Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communications.
Jackson has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies throughout the country, which include the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, Pottery Northwest, Vermont Studio Center, and the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Exhibitions include the 4th World Ceramic Biennale in Incheon Republic of Korea; the Wing Luke Museum of Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle; the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Los Angeles; and the USC Pacific Asia Museum.
