Heat-welded Hammered Brass and Silver Vessel "Moonlit Beach"

I was getting less work during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was happy to have more time to spend with my children during the first year, but I wanted to do something in the following year and decided to make something. This piece is quite different from what I had been making up till then.
I found a shell of a blue clam at a beach where I went camping when I was a beginner. As my children started complaining that their bodies hurt from the sea salt, I threw the shell away by accident with the fish that we caught. How I regretted to have thrown it away! But I was able to realize again how beautiful, interesting and fun the forms of living creatures were. This is the first piece that I made after feeling this way. I named this piece "Moonlit Beach" from Chuya Nakahara's poem; a poem about a person picking up a button on a beach. After reading Nakahara's poem, I thought I understood very well how the person in the poem felt when picking up the button.
The form of this vessel is simple, but I tried to make the core with silver to exactly fit inside. I carved out the shape of the blue clam from the brass lid and brazed a silver blue clam carved into the same shape onto the lid. I used a hammer on the outer side to form the bumps and dips on the surface, and used a chisel from the inner side of the lid to make patterns.

• Hammer forming

  In hammer forming (tankin), a mallet is used to shape a sheet of metal by hammering it into recessions in a wooden stump or block. Next, the metal sheet is worked on the end of specially shaped iron bars known as forming stakes (ategane) to gradually create the final form. It takes tens of thousands of hammer strikes to produce a single finished work.

• Hard soldering

  Hard soldering (hagiawase) is a technique used join together different types of metal sheet. The technique makes it possible to create metalwork with striped or patchwork patterns. Once joined, the artisan may continue to shape the metal with a hammer.