In 1981, Etsuko Tashima (b.1959) completed the postgraduate ceramic course of Osaka University of Arts, where she is now professor. Her graduation work, "Censored" (1981), was a series of legs cast from her own body and arranged so that they appeared to grow out of the ground. Attaching breasts to cups and making suggestive, sexual openings in her ceramic forms, she came to be heralded in the mid-'80s as one of the "super girls in fine art" — women artists who were associated with a wider feminist impulse in society after the inking of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986.
Her early works were large-scale, pop-art pieces, flush with manifest sexuality. Her protruding phalluses and bottoms, all done in acerbic colors, such as in "Hip Garden" (1986), were in many ways a hard take on Yayoi Kusama's "soft sculptures" of the same era. But it is to Mutsuo Yanagihara (b.1934), a follower of the influential 20th-century ceramic artist Kenkichi Tomimoto (1886-1963), that Tashima owes her initial creative direction. Yanagihara's brilliantly colored works in polka dots became Tashima's early stylistic predilection.
Her subsequent development took a turn to what might almost be described as art deco in "Floral No. 2" (1990), with its swirls and leaf patterns, and then to a brief period of geometry in the mid-'90s, using mechanical forms resembling cogs and hard-edged basic geometric structures, like that of "Sanctuary" (1994).