a blog about #pottery

My partner and I attended a pottery workshop at a studio outside of the city this past weekend. When you do pottery in a city, space is a premium. It's common to feel anywhere from cozy to a bit claustrophobic in a busy art studio. Most don't have any outdoor spaces, and even if they did, there would likely be restrictions on how openly you could do alternative firing techniques without creating significant risk to your neighbors or the general public. You can hardly even use outdoor grills in a lot of neighborhoods in my city, even if you have a back deck or patio for them.

For these reasons, we drove an hour to a much larger ceramics warehouse that had a large outdoor firing yard where you could have open flames, smoke clouds, and gas kilns. There, the head of the warehouse ran a Raku firing workshop for the dozen potters and their plus-ones all day. It was sunny with no clouds and was surprisingly windy all day, but it was overall a lovely time.

Raku originated in Japan. There, the piece was removed from the kiln while still very hot and it was left to cool in…