Ayaka Terajima‘s latest body of work — created for the solo exhibition “Spacey Clay” at nouveau deuxdeux in Munich, Germany — delivers a striking synthesis of the ancient and the artificial, the sacred and the synthetic. Through a constellation of new sculptures and works on paper, Terajima orchestrates a rich, multidimensional dialogue between cosmological symbolism, mythological archetypes, and the visual language of late-capitalist consumerism. Her practice fuses abstraction and figuration, invoking a dreamlike stratum where confectionery color palettes collide with arcane iconographies. At once visually playful and conceptually rigorous, “Spacey Clay” unfolds as a meditation on transformation, identity, and the porous boundary between the sacred and the disposable.
Terajima’s practice moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, drawing from a wide lexicon that includes archaeology, folklore, physics, and advertising. Her newest paper works incorporate supermarket advertising imagery for the first time, adding a new layer of conceptual and visual texture. These collaged fragments of consumer ephemera introduce a chromatic vibrancy that stands in tension with the mythic and symbolic elements embedded in the work. Yet these commercial aesthetics are not merely employed as stylistic devices—they serve as portals for deeper inquiry. Through their presence, Terajima interrogates cycles of consumption, the nature of disposability, and our collective relationship to material excess.
Ayaka Terajima Explores Heritage Through Clay
Courtesy of artist and Thomas Dashuber.
Ayaka Terajima, “Spacey Clay,” courtesy of the artist and Heike Dempster.
This use of ephemeral materials in her works on paper finds a parallel in her sculptural practice. Terajima continues to employ molds made from mass-produced food packaging—such as trays, wrappers, and plastic containers—to shape clay forms that are then built upon and fired into elaborate, tactile ceramics. While their origins lie in the industrial, the resulting sculptures possess a raw, handmade quality that resists total commodification, that function simultaneously as figurative embodiments of strength and heritage, infused with intimacy, cultural memory, and spiritual charge. As if covered in body armour made of contemporary references merged with ancient wisdom, her sculptures materialize a cosmological engagement. The Doki figures—ornately decorated, unglazed vessels from Japan’s Jōmon period inform her sculptures. We meet the dokis in various sizes and natural clay shades, each with a unique character and visual markers that shape them.
Terajima draws from ancestral forms to craft ceramic works that exist in dialogue with both tradition and contemporary culture. Though grounded in historical craftsmanship, her pieces are inflected with irony and critique, particularly through the appropriation of packaging materials that typically signify disposability. In this juxtaposition, Terajima invites reflection on what is preserved and what is discarded—both materially and culturally.
“Terajima invites reflection on what is preserved and what is discarded—both materially and culturally,”
Crafting with Cosmology and Temporality
Ayaka Terajima, “I looked up and she looked at me – 4,” 2025, Oil Pastel on collaged advertising paper, 70 x 98 cm; courtesy of the artist and Heike Dempster.
At the core of Terajima’s inquiry remains a mythological narrative populated by hybrid figures—vessels that oscillate between human, animal, and celestial forms. These beings appear as time-travelers or dream-entities: simultaneously futuristic and primordial, mechanical and sacred. They inhabit an ambiguous world shaped by cycles, thresholds, and transformation. This duality is central to Terajima’s investigation into the instability of form and meaning. Her work proposes that the boundaries we draw—between body and object, past and present, myth and reality—are fluid and perpetually shifting.
In “Spacey Clay,” Terajima deepens her cosmological interests by focusing on the Moon as a conceptual anchor. Historically venerated across cultures as a symbol of rebirth, intuition, and rhythmic order, the Moon becomes a framework through which the artist explores embodiment and temporality. She invokes the ancient writings of Hippocrates, who warned against performing surgery on certain body parts during specific lunar phases, pointing to a once-held belief in the Moon’s physiological and spiritual influence. By reactivating such cosmologies, Terajima bridges ancient systems of knowledge with contemporary questions around the self, the body, and time.
Ayaka Terajima, “Spacey Clay,” courtesy of the artist and Heike Dempster.
This cosmological engagement materializes most clearly in her sculptural references to Doki figures—ornately decorated, unglazed vessels from Japan’s Jōmon period. Terajima draws from these ancestral forms to craft ceramic works that exist in dialogue with both tradition and contemporary culture. Though grounded in historical craftsmanship, her pieces are inflected with irony and critique, particularly through the appropriation of packaging materials that typically signify disposability. In this juxtaposition, Terajima invites reflection on what is preserved and what is discarded—both materially and culturally.
Her works become vessels in every sense: containers of matter, memory, myth, and spiritual resonance. Their hollow interiors, often punctuated with apertures, suggest a kind of waiting—a presence that is both visible and concealed. What do these forms hold? Ghosts? Stories? Residues of desire? The ambiguity is intentional. By blurring the line between object and body, Terajima emphasizes permeability, inviting the viewer to consider themes of visibility, reciprocity, and recognition. “I looked up and she looked at me,” she writes—evoking a moment of mutual gaze, of cosmic acknowledgment. It is within this liminal space, between looking and being seen, that her work finds its poetics.
Sculpting the Alchemy of the Everyday
Ayaka Terajima, “Spacey Clay,” courtesy of the artist and Heike Dempster.
The tension between the synthetic and the organic is further heightened by her incorporation of motifs from industrial food culture. Confectionery textures, snack packaging, and molded plastics become stand-ins for both sustenance and seduction. These materials, embedded within figures that reference yōkai (Japanese supernatural beings), deities, and folkloric animals, signal the entanglement of consumption and identity. The ingestion of packaged food becomes an allegory for how we consume not only goods but also meaning, culture, and the self.
In Terajima’s visual cosmology, the body is not a fixed form but a mutable site—open to metamorphosis, absorption, and rupture. Anatomical references such as feet, legs, and incision-like marks ground the work in physical reality, even as its symbolic layers drift toward the metaphysical. The Moon, in this sense, functions not just as a celestial body but as a metaphor: a cyclical force, shaping tides, emotion, and spiritual renewal.
Terajima’s idiosyncratic lexicon—rich with glyphs, limbs, snack wrappers, and mythic creatures—asks us to consider how consumption, identity, and sacred meaning intertwine. Her works don’t simply critique modern life; they alchemize it, forging a new mythology from the fragments of the disposable. With her new works, Terajima proposes not an escape from the contemporary condition, but a haunting, beautiful reimagining of it—lunar, luminous, and defiantly alive.
Ayaka Terajima, “Little two thin legs,” 2025, Unglazed fired ceramic by red clay, 33 x 18 x 24 cm; courtesy of the artist and Heike Dempster.
Ayaka Terajima , “Twin heads Doki-middle,” 2022, Unglazed fired ceramic, 73x 30 x 33 cm; courtesy of the artist and Heike Dempster.
