Throwing Pots

Craft class

One crazy summer, Craftscurator packed her overalls and went on a pottery holiday. Coming from a family of potters, she decided it was time to learn how to throw pots.

In a lovely old barn in France, Craftscurator learned how to work a lump of clay on the wheel. Not an easy task to 'center' the clay in a delicate way. Eventually, we managed rudimentary bowls and some more elegant cups. We learned how to finish a product, to arrange the pieces in the oven. Applying glaze was fun to do, but took quite a bit of imagination to understand the effects, as the liquid glaze is matt and has a very different colour than the final layer. After glazing, it was time to arrange products in the Anagama oven, and to chop 2 cubic meters of wood. This firing technique originates in Japan, where all potters from a village sometimes fired a year worth of work in one session! And a session it was, it took us 15 hours to reach a temperature of 1400 degrees. It took as much time for the oven to cool down, while we were impatiently looking in. The group of aspiring potters then displayed the final results on a table, and we received in-depth feedback from the master potter.

After spening so much time in workshops and small factories, Craftscurator loved to get her hands dirty and understand the complexity of this craft.