Born in 1982, Shinichi Sawada has attended Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare organisation for disabled individuals in Japan, since the year 2000, where he divides his time working in the sculpture hut up in the mountains, and in the institution’s bakery. Having been creative from an early age, using sweet wrappers and other found objects to make art with, he first began with sashiko textiles but quickly moved to using clay.

Sawada is a prolific artist taking around four days to complete each piece. When Sawada works, he demonstrates such confidence and assuredness that it seems he has already envisioned how his final pieces will look. With his delicate fingers, he applies each ‘thorn’ onto the main body of the piece without showing any kind of hesitation and always works in silence. The ‘thorns’ evolved over time, becoming denser and more rounded, often in straight orderly lines across the works. He often places older works in a line next to him when working, almost like an audience or friends.

It is only feasible for Sawada to work on his ceramics during the spring and summer months due to severe winter weather conditions affecting the ceramics in the open-sided sheet metal hut. Each of his pieces are left to dry out for at least six months before entering the hand-made wood fired oven. Firing only takes place once a year due to the celebratory nature of the traditional event, and the cost of all the wood used for the fire. They are fired at a constant temperature for three days and nights, with the oven taking a week to cool down before they are removed. This is why the pieces have different colours across them dependent upon where they were placed in the oven, and depending on how the ash crystallises and sits on the surface of the work. No glaze is ever used.

Being autistic with little communication means that his works and their ‘thorns’ remain a mystery to us. There were around twenty different motifs that he replicated each time, each one being unique in some way. However, since 2017 his work has taken on a different look, with less ‘thorns’ across the body of the pieces, and more focus on the faces. This may have been influenced by another Japanese artist who joined him in the hut called Akio Kontani.

In 2020, a solo exhibition of his work traveled from the Museum Lothar Fischer in Neumarkt, to the George Kolbe Museum in Berlin. His work has featured prominently in major group exhibitions around the world, including The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and The Doors of Perception at Frieze New York in 2019. His work is held in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; Halle Saint Pierre, Paris; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca. In 2024 a touring museum show across America is planned, alongside a monograph.