When the ceramicist and former Canberra Artist of the Year, Hiroe Swen, leaves Canberra for her native Japan in early July, she will look back on having lived 57 of her 91 years here, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA.
Hiroe Swen has been significantly honoured in the past year by three separate exhibitions at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, the Canberra Potters’ Society Gallery and Melbourne’s Skepsi Gallery.
She spent the first 34 years of her life in Kyoto, before meeting her late husband, Dutch-born artist Cornel Swen, marrying him in Kyoto and soon relocating to Australia.
Why to Canberra? That was because Cornel got a job as an artist in the Department of Immigration and Hiroe found a teaching position at the School of Art, allowing them to buy a 22-hectare sheep farm in the Googong area near Queanbeyan, where they set up their Pastoral Gallery and ran it from 1973-2003.
Cornel was already a well-regarded designer-artist, while Hiroe, though born into a kimono-making family, had started making ceramics at the age of 23. She would become one of Australia’s most respected ceramic artists, notable for the huge size of many of her artworks, which sometimes dwarfed the petit Hiroe.
I caught up with her in her near-empty house in Queanbeyan.
From her huge collection of artworks, a colleague will take the bulk for sale online, while she will take 80 back to Japan because, as she puts it, “my work is my face”.
Friends and admirers have expressed shock that she would repatriate after all these years, but she will relocate not to her hometown, Kyoto, but to Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s major islands and home to an 88-temple Buddhist pilgrimage route.
Just before she turned 21, she spent her New Year’s holidays there with three college friends and speaks of the island’s reputation as a place of pilgrimage, where people go for mental and physical replenishment.
“I found that the Shikoku people had a particular character,” she says, “they were so warm, they took care of strangers, I was so impressed,” .
“People say I’m crazy to go back,” but she says, having cared for her mother, who died at age 98 in a Canberra nursing home, taking Japanese food to her seven days a week, then having nursed her husband Cornel, who died in 2022, she’s done a lot of thinking about aged care. She is especially aware of the effects good food has on health.
“I never thought I would go back to Japan, but after Cornel died I was beginning to think, now that I’m old and I can’t look after myself, where should I go?”
A well-meaning friend tried to encourage her to go into an expensive Canberra care facility so she went to an open day, enjoyed the sandwiches, admired the smart suits and politeness of the carers, but after three days said no, thank you.
“I got thinking, what would it be like to eat that food every day? But if I eat Japanese food every day, I can never have enough.”
So why not return to Kyoto? Well, she spent 34 years there, and now most of her old friends are either dead or on walking frames, but on Shikoku she has young friends who have helped her find a piece of land near them, on which she is already building a house and studio.
“I like the Shikoku weather. It’s warm in winter and has a nice sea-breeze in summer, the food is good and I’ll have beautiful friends looking after me,” she says.
She’s also returning to her own language, important because she knows that as people get old, they often go back to their own language.
“I want to make textiles now and use the Australian influence and Cornel‘s designs, which will have his stamp and my stamp,” she adds.
She’s already made contact with the culture section of the Australian embassy in Tokyo, who are planning a 50th anniversary celebration of their building, and says: “I want to be an Australia-Japan bridge… the younger generation in Japan don’t want to know anything about foreign countries, but I think that making art helps understanding.
“I’m embarking on a new chapter. It is deeply painful to leave here after 57 years, but I choose moving to Japan because I want to find a haven for myself.”
“I still have dreams. I’m not going to just get old and wait for death,” she says.
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