Kazuya Ishida was born into a family of potters in Bizen, Japan. Bizen is one of the six ‘ancient kilns’ and is famous for its traditional unglazed, high temperature-fired, Bizen-style pottery. He uses a wood-fired noborigama (multiple chamber climbing kiln) and anagama (single chamber climbing kiln). He trained with Jun Isezaki, a Living National Treasure in Bizen for four years, followed by time spent in the UK - including a residency at the Leach Pottery; learning different styles of pottery before establishing his own studio in Bizen.

Invited into the Anagama Project run by the University of Oxford, he has been a lead resident potter teaching kiln-making, firing and pottery making techniques, while lecturing about his craft.

Kazuya makes sculptures and vases featuring his distinctive spiralling marks; created with a technique inspired by a teenage love for breakdancing. Works are created by throwing a basic cylindrical form on a potter’s wheel, which is then followed by a process of carefully etching lines onto the surface. Then, it is thrown on the wheel again, thereby warping both the form and its motifs, giving birth to pieces that are organic at first glance and yet ordered in nature. In using limited materials (specifically natural clay and natural ash glazes) in line with the Bizen tradition, he explores the rhythms and patterns of nature.

The contemporary forms of his work reflect the primordial rippled textures and patterns of an ocean bed or tectonic shifts in a cliff face and the marks that ebbing tides leave rock pools, pebbles and seashells.