After several years of study in a specialized school, Shinichi Sawada has been diagnosed with autism and joined the center for mentally challenged in Kusatsu. He practices ceramics in an open-air art studio, lost in the mountains, shaping strange creatures, resembling in turn humans, reptiles, sea urchins and birds bristling with thorns. He models one by one the tips which he then fixes on a form that will become the creature’s body. He works in silence, without hesitation, repeating the same slow gestures, delicate and regular. Once modeled, his sculptures are fired in a wood oven, following an ancestral tradition.