Most of us can probably reach for a dozen useful objects in our homes without really seeing them. Their purposes are ordinary, so they disappear into routine.

And if we had to guess who made, say, the coffee mugs that clutter our cabinets, our favorite cereal bowl, the bud vase sprouting green onions in the windowsill, we’d guess they were mass-produced, unless we knew better. We’d probably be right — but the thread of thought would wither as we reached for the cornflakes.

Local resident and potter Naysan McIlhargey is hoping to encourage folks to pick up that thread and  follow it with his upcoming Miami Valley Pottery show, “Mingei.” The show takes its name — and gathers its meaning — from a Japanese philosophy that emerged in the early 20th century centered on the beauty of handmade objects intended for daily use.

“Mingei” will debut as a pop-up show in the former YS Hardware store space on Xenia Avenue, June 1–14 — the first public use of the building since the hardware store closed last year and the property was purchased by the YS Development Corporation through a loan from the YS Community Foundation.

This month, inside McIlhargey’s wood kiln at Miami Valley Pottery, the forms of what would ultimately be more than 100 designs could be dimly seen in the early heat of prefire: bowls, pitchers, bottles, asymmetrical vessels.

Showing the News around his kiln and workshop, McIlhargey introduced the history and concepts inherent to Mingei: Both the word “mingei,” which roughly translates to “arts of the people” or “folk art,” and the concept were developed by philosopher and critic Sōetsu Yanagi, alongside a circle of Japanese potters and craftspeople in the 1920s.

The Mingei movement argued that true beauty was not found in objects made to be observed, but in humble things made sincerely, often by anonymous craftspeople, and used every day. Mingei proposes that beauty should live in ordinary rituals: eating, drinking, gathering, serving and sharing.

The Mingei philosophy at large is laid out in the 1972 book “The Unknown Craftsman,” which compiles years of writing by Yanagi adapted by Yanagi’s friend, British potter Bernard Leach, for English readers. McIlhargey summed up the contents of the book in brief: “The basic concept is that you live with handmade, beautiful things every day, and you use them. And if it’s made by an unknown craftsman, even better, because it’s not about collecting the pot and keeping it on a shelf; it’s about using something that is made to be used, every day.”

Rooted in Buddhist ideas of humility, harmony and freedom from ego, Mingei emerged, in part, as a response to westernized industrialization and mass production, which Yanagi believed had severed people from understanding and relating to the objects that filled their lives.

“Unfortunately, Americans, we’re not so good at it,” McIlhargey said. “Our things are disposable.”

Mingei has become both artistic study and personal practice for McIlhargey, who first learned pottery from local artists David and Keiko Hergesheimer; their own work was deeply influenced, he said, by Japanese pottery. At Earlham College, McIlhargey studied Japanese arts, which awakened a desire to visit Japan.

Last summer, he finally did.

He traveled via the Sister Cities of Dayton program, to Oiso, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, with another potter and three students, including Yellow Springs students Stella Platt and Oskar Dennis. After that formal week, he stayed another two weeks, traveling to museums and the homes of several Japanese National Treasures — including the home of legendary Shōji Hamada, a leading artist of the Mingei movement who authored the foreword of “The Unknown Craftsman,” as well as the home of Yanagi himself.

He also visited Nihon Mingei-kan, the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum, founded by Yanagi, Hamada and Kanjirō Kawai, in Tokyo in 1936. Yanagi writes of the museum’s ethos and purpose in “The Unknown Craftsman”: “The name, Nihon Mingei-kan, is not mere words: it stands for the arts of the people, returned to the people. … It is my belief that while the high level of culture of any country can be found in its fine arts, it is also vital that we should be able to examine and enjoy the proofs of the culture of the great mass of the people, which we call folk art. … The main objective of the folkcraft museum is to allow this to be done.”

McIlhargey said he came back from the trip to Japan with 20 new pieces of pottery picked up along his travels — and the underlying philosophy for the upcoming show. “Mingei” will feature 101 shapes McIlhargey pulled from his own extensive library of books on Japanese pottery, as well as some of the pieces he obtained on his trip — shapes that are between 100 and 1,000 years old.

Ahead of firing, he compiled a workbook with images of each of the shapes he wanted to form, along with notes on materials and queries about how a potter centuries ago might have made a curve, a neck or a foot.

“It was a really intense study to learn, ‘How the hell am I going to do this?’” McIlhargey said with a laugh. “It’s a fascinating puzzle to figure out. How did they do it? Most of it is trial and error — a lot of it is experimental.”

The upcoming show will feature porcelain, stoneware and dark stoneware pieces and, in line with experimentation, some techniques that are new to McIlhargey.

“I’m using glazes I’m not too familiar with,” he said, flipping through the workbook and pointing out a gray shino glaze. “I’ve never done this before, and this is a technique unique to Japan, mostly — a shino over a slip with wax.”

He also noted a green oribe glaze, which he said typically doesn’t work well in the kind of wood kiln he operates.

“So I bricked up the door this time to encourage more air, so we’d have more of an oxidized atmosphere in the kiln to maybe get some greens, because typically the green glazes turn red and purple,” he said. “It’s just a vast world of incredible ceramic.”

In Japan, McIlhargey said, he saw how deeply pottery is woven into daily life, in part, through the tea ceremony — a ritual preparation and imbibement of powdered green tea, matcha — which “pursues the dynamic rather than the static aspect of beauty” and “seeks beauty in the motion of things,” as Yanagi wrote.

“In Japan, food and the tea ceremony, those two things are so critical in everybody’s lives and in part of their upbringing that they understand and cherish pottery, and that’s why they take care of it, and why they use it daily,” McIlhargey said.

The American habit, by contrast, is often to save beautiful things for special occasions — to protect them from daily life. Mingei asks almost the opposite: What if a bowl is most fully itself, most beautiful, when it’s filled?

The question followed the interview from the kiln to McIlhargey’s nearby home, which itself is partly ceramic in that he’s installed inside the house hundreds of tiles he formed and fired.

“And we tiled so many places in our house that there’s nowhere else to tile — so we started tiling outside,” McIlhargey said.

Thus, McIlhargey and his family don’t just live with beautiful things — they live inside them, enveloped by them. Alongside McIlhargey’s tiles, hundreds of pieces of pottery fill shelves and cabinets, many — not all — used regularly. McIlhargey said he still makes space to display rare treasures that are “a little more precious” — such as a pair of 600-year-old pots he and his wife, Jalana Lazar, brought back from their honeymoon in China.

He pointed to some pieces by potter Warren MacKenzie, widely considered an American master of pottery in the Mingei tradition.

“So I’m part of the apprenticeship tradition passed down many generations, but Warren MacKenzie was very close [to Mingei’s foundation] — he worked with Bernard Leach and was best friends with Shōji Hamada,” McIlhargey said.

But most of the pottery in McIlhargey’s house was made by friends and mentors. Far from being “unknown craftsmen,” McIlhargey said most of the pieces were purchased after he “went to the potter’s house and got to know them.”

“So whenever I take the mug down and use it, it’s a conversation that I’m having with my friend down in North Carolina or in Massachusetts,” he said, making the connection to Mingei through intention rather than anonymity: “That’s another part of it — the meaning of the use is heightened. Every pot has a story.”

Stories will inevitably also infuse the pieces that, at press time, have just emerged from the kiln. The “Mingei” collection — and all Miami Valley Pottery firings, McIlhargey said --- requires the work of a few dozen people to tend the kiln as it reaches about 2,500 degrees, with folks taking shifts through the night. Ash builds, glazes change and the artist learns to surrender — maybe pots will crack, or maybe they’ll turn out more beautiful than their maker could have planned.

“You learn to be detached and not get too into anything in particular, and just kind of hope,” McIlhargey said.

And hope, in this case, is infused into each pot fired — a hope that, after they’re carried downtown into a space once again made useful, the pots, beautiful as they may be, will be taken home and themselves be made useful.

“Because I’m so passionate about it, I live that way, and I want my customers to as well, because there’s so much joy that you get out of it every day,” McIlhargey said. “I want them to experience it.”