Peter Shire combines craft, fine art and industrial design, taking from each aspect to create furniture, fashion, architecture and his mainstay medium, ceramics. Shire’s works have been exhibited in the United States, Italy, France, Japan and Poland; Shire has been associated with the Memphis Group of Designers, has worked on the Design Team for the 1984 XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles, which was recognized by the American Institute of Architects, and has created over 40 public sculptures in Los Angeles and nationally. A Los Angeles native, Shire has been honored by awards for his contribution to the cultural life of the City of Los Angeles, and runs his art studio out of Echo Park, the neighborhood of his birth.

Between 1991 and 1992, Shire took five trips to Japan and in the process made huge, astounding sculptures for Sapporo Breweries, the Hokuden Company and the AIM factory. While at AIM, with the assistance of his assistant, Shire created over 30 elegant small scale sculptures. In 2008, AIM went out of business and Shire returned to Japan to recover the works, included in the May 2011 exhibiton Hokkaido Story Revisited: Late Spring and this accompanying book.

48 Pages

Mystical practical absurdism, amazing, astounding phenomena on a human scale and what is funny about the way we love and hate industrial things…is what interests me.
– Peter Shire