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On the Seto Inland Sea
the Work of Peter Helinski and Benjamin Heiken at One Wall Gallery

by Benjamin Terrell

Seen depicted on pottery shards washed up on the beaches of the Seto Inland Sea: Pine and plum, geese and reeds, rabbits and dragons in moon and mist, paulownia tree or paulownia leaf, folding fans and chrysanthemums, a single carp or tortoise with waves, a single horse on a hill, a solitary man rowing his boat.

Work by Benjamin Heiken (left and center) and Peter Helinski (right)
​at One Wall Gallery in Eugene, Oregon.
August - September, 2026

Kaolin clay from Kyushu, feldspar, wood ash, rice straw ash, pine ash, copper for the rare green, Persian cobalt coming from China through the turbulent East China Sea.

Helinski (left) and Heiken (right)

Boats slowly loaded, overloaded, overconfident merchants caught in typhoons, capsized, broken boats deliberately dumping broken cargo, eroding villages tossing inferior kiln loads, offerings to war and to water. History revealing itself in the smallest of pieces.

The whole world has never not been broken things viewed as whole or whole things seen as broken. Even we are minute particles forged by forgetfulness, held together by assumptions.

I also found pottery shards in the fields where Van Gogh lived and painted. More utilitarian in purpose - bits of brick, broken clay vessels and discarded crockery meant to make the soil better, richer. Van Gogh too walked over similar broken pieces, unbeknownst that he too was a future shard for constant reinterpretation.

Heiken (center) and Helinski (left and right)

This world we walk is itself an ocean, and also an ocean floor. I imagine even time is a mosaic of fragments. Both facts and feelings arrive incomplete in service of something larger and unknowable. Even art can only be contextualized for so long, destined for another wall, another floor.

On Peter Helinski:
In a forest of some studio somewhere, there are faces etched in the underbrush, cardboard as its leaves, wire as its branches. Also genitals and jelly combs, hair picks, hands shaped like reluctant hair picks, torsos and breasts. All of these things held in the most common of containers - cardboard. Give it a stick, propped upside down it's a soft trap for its unusual contents. Paint its insides and back, it's ribbed like a tortoise shell or some shanty's armor.

On Benjamin Heiken:
I once saw the ribs of an old ship slowly emerge during a drought that threatened to dry up the Mississippi rolling by the banks of downtown Memphis. Some artists' studios are like great rivers - not constrained by the name, never the same. Decisions like fragments, material bits like major movements, paint used like the artist was painting Twombly's actual palette, precursor to any masterpiece.

Helinski's mark is made with a china marker, or grease pencil, named for its ability to write on multiple types of glossy surfaces like ceramic, glass or metal. It makes a consistent coarseness, like a grave rubbing done from a comic book cemetery. As if instead of wax in the crayon the artist switched it to granite.

Heiken's use of jute instead of cotton canvas feels biblical, almost Old Testament. Soaked coarse Bengal stalks that carry coffee, grains, cotton itself. Often cut and unraveling with a looseness looking like some unknown animal gathers it for nightly bedding.

And then there's the pie tin, the shard that could have been, the precursor to the Frisbee, the original coffin, the industrial age's gift to the home. Helinski fills them with breasts like plasma bags, breasts like rolling pins. Some fertility yin yang for empty and full.

Heiken's Moon - the mystic moon, also moon mania, rich people in space meets the Shining's son's Apollo sweater. Conspiracy and conspirators meet face to face. A small frog decal partially buried. A streak of color reminding of something that should be buried but made center story. And a bottom abstraction squints to be a torn Tahitian sarong.

The earth is the bottom of the sky like the studio is the roof to all art at some point. Perhaps the internet too is a kiln that opens on its own ocean floor. Different detritus — broken unknowable devices, beaches of discarded denim, things that need things that are no longer made, email accounts living past their users, anything once large as evidence of the loose grasp of something yet to be understood. Life before the awkward polishing of technology.

What is the pilgrim's polish? The wave created by another's obstruction? The sadness of the fragment never knowing its full unimaginable fragile form? The coarseness of sand, the sometimes jagged shard, the beachcomber's studio home to an unrelenting process that demands unlimited examples for the word resolve.

I carry a small piece of stoneware from the Seto sea in my pocket as a worry stone. My thumb rubs its incomplete curve, once a utilitarian bowl, gridded on one side, patterned like a wave on its back. I initially misread the definition of its origin - Sometsuke. It translates to dying and decorating, and my mind still plays with how else that can be imagined.

​- Benjamin Terrell, 2026
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You can see more at:

@one.wall.gallery
@peterhelinski
@benjamin.t.heiken
@benjamin_terrell_painting