Ikura Takashi was born in Gifu in 1962 and graduated from the Tajimi City Ceramic Design Research Institute in 1989. His first solo exhibition was held in 2004, the same year in which his work was first accepted for the Mainichi Newspaper's triennial Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition (also in 2007 and 2010). His work was included in the exhibition The Power of Crafts: Outlook for the 21st Century held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2007. This work was shown at his solo exhibition at Nakacho Konishi Arts, a recently established Tokyo-based gallery, in April 2010. The show was entitled 'Where Shadow Meets Form' and featured 15 works made between 2007 and 2010.

The gap between Ikura's graduating from the Tajimi City Ceramic Design Research Institute in 1989 and his first solo exhibition in 2004 can be explained by the fact that until his early thirties Ikura was primarily engaged in the running of the family business, which specialises in the mass production of porcelain tableware. His work is inspired by a dual fascination with the inorganic and the organic, or, as he has stated more specifically, with the contrast between industrially produced consumer goods and the more fecund warmth of the natural world. This contrast is directly reflected in the tension between the almost clinical coldness of the unglazed white porcelain he uses and the swirling movement of his heavily ribbed forms.

Ikura's works border on the unbelievable in the way in which they are thrown as single, thick-walled vessels and then meticulously pared down with knives and planes, and then, after bisque-firing, polished smooth with abrasive paper. Their appearance is industrial and yet they have been made by the most painstaking of hand-crafting methods. It is almost as if he is challenging the world of rapid-prototyping by producing shapes that defy conception except through the nimble touch of the human hand.