GURU GURU MEGURU — ぐるぐるめぐる | Works by Teruri Yamawaki

GURU GURU MEGURU — ぐるぐるめぐる

Works by Teruri Yamawaki

This September, Teruri Yamawaki presents GURU GURU MEGURU (ぐるぐるめぐる), a new exhibition of ceramic sculpture exploring cycles, transformation and the enduring language of the spiral.

“Guru Guru” is a Japanese onomatopoeia describing something spinning, swirling or spiralling, while “Meguru” speaks to circulation — to moving around, returning and coming back again. Together, the words evoke a sense of continuous movement: a world in which nothing remains still, and everything is constantly becoming something else.

Inspired by the sacred spirals found in ancient monuments in Ireland and in Yamawaki’s home country of Japan, the exhibition brings these two distant landscapes into conversation through clay. The works draw on a visual language that has travelled across cultures and centuries, using the vortex as a symbol of continuity, movement and the eternal cycle of existence.

There is something deeply tactile about Yamawaki’s ceramic forms. Their organic, porous surfaces suggest both natural growth and ancient geological structures, inviting us to look closely and consider the forces that shape and reshape the world around us. Through clay, a material rooted in the earth, the artist creates a bridge between places, histories and ways of understanding the passage of time.

Since antiquity, humanity has turned to the spiral to express ideas of life, death, renewal and transformation. In GURU GURU MEGURU, this ancient symbol becomes a contemporary meditation on the endless cycles through which we move — returning to familiar places, changing as we go, and becoming part of something larger than ourselves.