My name is Anais Franco the creator of studio sachi.
studio sachi is about ideas of looping and cyclical manifestations using design and craft.
Sachiko, in Japanese means child of bliss, it’s the middle name of my grandmother who prophesied that the first born grandchild will share her middle name, me. And I carried it on, by naming my cat. Sachi.
There was a foggy distinction between these ideas until one summer day Sachi died in a fight with neighborhood coyotes–that her name, my name, my grandmother's wish are all part of the same thing. Through every phase of life, there are living motifs that carry on with you. A dinner table, the plates, the cats under the table and the stories we etch into eachother. When Sachi died I found myself sitting at the table, with the plates and the people as we told of what could have happened to her. Maybe she was heroic; saving her brother Theo from a pack of coyotes, or sacrificing herself for Mochi, her new sister who was brought from an unresolved place. Through the grief process, my family and I came up with story loops to make sense of the unforeseen.
I have always found myself invested in the life cycle a salmon goes through. The painful transformation from freshwater to saltwater to then return upstream back to freshwater for their homecoming. This cycle I now know is the thing we must all go through. The thing that we all end up at. Cycles/Patterns/Loops have wrapped themselves around me. They’ve been the processes in creating art, in understanding the bad and accepting the good.
Nerikomi or Neriage is a Japanese technique that uses colored clay, layered together, to then reveal a pattern. I utilize the nature of layering and inlaying a material into itself, for it to eventually become a singular form.
With any ceramics, you play with its natural ability to hold form, the inevitably of change and trying to maintain an aspect of control. With this cycle, it's all the same material, simply put through different life stages-wrestling through different stages to get to its final form.
With any ceramics, you play with its natural ability to hold form, the inevitably of change and trying to maintain an aspect of control. With this cycle, it's all the same material, simply put through different life stages-wrestling through different stages to get to its final form.
The salmon retrieve, presenting the uphill battle against the current that introduces an impossible waterfall, bears and humans. In that moment, it becomes a synchronicity that ends and begins the cycle all over again.