Porcelain, in most hands, is silent. In Hitomi Hosono’s, it murmurs, sighs, and rustles like a field of leaves shifting under the autumn wind. Her vessels are not static containers but living organisms — sculptures where memory grows leaf by leaf, tendril by tendril, into a botanical cosmos.

Born in 1976 in Tajimi, a Japanese city steeped in centuries of ceramic tradition, Hosono inherited clay as others inherit language. The granddaughter of a plaster worker and the daughter of rice farmers, she grew up surrounded by fields where frogs sang through summer nights and rice leaves whispered in the breeze. These sounds, these textures, have never left her. In London, where she now works, every carved porcelain leaf seems to echo that green chorus from her childhood.

The Language of Leaves

Hosono’s art begins with close observation.

I find myself drawn to the intricacy of plants examining the veins of a leaf, how its edges are shaped, the layering of a flower’s petals.

– She has said.

Her process is patient, devotional. Each porcelain leaf is cast in a mould, then slowly applied to a hand-thrown base, layered until the vessel resembles a forest floor frozen mid-breath.

The Large Feather Leaves Bowl contains over 1,000 such leaves, each made individually and assembled over the course of a year. Looking at it is less like admiring a bowl than like standing under a canopy of trees, the wind moving in invisible currents around you.

Sprigging Reimagined

At the core of Hosono’s practice lies sprigging — a centuries-old technique revived by Wedgwood in the 18th century, in which clay reliefs are pressed into moulds and applied to a ceramic surface. During her studies at the Royal College of Art and her residency at Wedgwood in 2018, Hosono absorbed this tradition and then subverted it.

Where sprigging was once ornamental — cherubs, laurels, decorative borders — Hosono makes it total, immersive. Her vessels are not simply adorned but consumed by leaves, their entire surfaces covered in sculptural growth. Porcelain becomes a living skin, dense with veins and petals, where ornament blossoms into structure.

Gold, Memory, and the Sacred

One of her most admired works, A Very Large Oval Nazuna Vase, reveals another layer of meaning. Its porcelain body is covered with nazuna (shepherd’s purse) leaves, while its interior gleams with yellow gold leaf — a luminous memory of her grandmother’s Butsudan, the Buddhist family altar.

When I am applying gold leaf inside my porcelain pieces, I remember my grandmother’s words. Then I feel there’s a heaven behind the gold leaf where my ancestors are now living.

– Hosono recalls.

In this way, her vessels become reliquaries of memory, binding earthly flora to spiritual inheritance.

Between Japan and Britain

Hosono’s career embodies a dialogue between cultures. Trained first at Kanazawa College of Art, where she studied Kutani ceramics and the art of gold leaf, she later refined her skills in Copenhagen before settling in London. At Wedgwood, she inherited the lineage of Jasperware but redirected it toward her own botanical vision, fusing Japanese sensitivity with British craft traditions.

Her works now reside in the permanent collections of the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Represented by Adrian Sassoon, she has become one of the leading figures in contemporary ceramic art, admired for her ability to merge fragility and monumentality, intimacy and grandeur.

In Hosono’s hands, porcelain is no longer cold, delicate, or remote. It is alive — a vessel of memory, a reliquary of landscape, a sculpture where tradition and innovation entwine. Her leaves, petals, and tendrils remind us that clay remembers: it remembers hands, places, and stories pressed into its surface across centuries.

Hosono does not simply decorate porcelain. She animates it. She makes it breathe.