Dorodango, the Japanese art of making mud balls - Laurence King Blog
Hi there, this is Bruce Gardner. I am out of Albuquerque, New Mexico and my strange superpower is: I am very good at making mud balls, aka hikaru dorodango. I’m taking over the Laurence King blog today to introduce my new book, Dorodango: The Japanese Art of Making Mud Balls.
Coming from the words doro, meaning “mud” and dango, a type of Japanese flour cake, hikaru dorodango consists of forming a mud ball by hand. Layers of increasingly fine dirt are added to the surface over the space of days to a point at which the dorodango can be polished to a high sheen (hikaru means “shining”).
No one seems to know precisely when or where this art form originated, but it is generally understood to have begun as a playground activity among Japanese schoolchildren.
I was introduced to hikaru dorodango by a William Gibson essay in Tate Magazine, way back in 2002. I was immediately bowled over by the idea of creating art from such a humble material; I have been creating mud balls ever since.
