If you are exploring our beautiful Midlands Meander in the last few days of the holidays, be sure to pop into the Zulululu Arthouse at Piggly Wiggly to see the fascinating work of one of our talented students, Ethan Perry.
Ethan creates Hikaru Dorodango, a captivating Japanese art form that transforms humble dirt into mirror-like, polished spheres. Here is how Ethan describes his craft in his own words:
"They look like spheres of polished stone or glazed ceramics, however they are in fact nothing more than balls of mud. My source is just ordinary clay-based dirt... rolled on a ceramic cup into a perfect sphere. There is no polish of any kind, it is simply mud, sand, and sawdust.
It seems impossible that such mundane, and often disliked material can become something so elegant and beautiful.
The artform itself originated in the schools of ancient Japan, where it is thought that school children learnt that by methodically rolling a lump of mud on a cup, they could (with a bit of patience) get these perfectly spherical and very shiny balls. However, the tradition slowly faded into dust, until at the turn of the millennium a Japanese professor of child education stumbled upon the old craft.
It became popular in the early two thousands and has since become just that, a means for many people to let go and get lost in each turn of the sphere from ugly mud to a polished gem.
I discovered the craft in mid-2025. I found a clump of red clay, commonly found in Midlands area under a tap and rolled it into a tiny little ball on the top of a plastic water battle. That night the itch started and ever since I have been consistently making Hikaru dorodango.
Earlier this year the owner of the arthouse noticed my work and was immediately interested in them. I am really grateful to the kindness of Juliette Donkin from Zulululu for letting me show of my work there, it is defiantly not something I would have ever expected to even be a possibility.”
We are incredibly proud of Ethan, not only for his remarkable artistic skill, but for showing us so metaphorically how patience and vision can turn something ordinary and unrefined into something truly beautiful.