The most beautiful one-off item you can buy for home right now is a unique ceramic piece.
Ceramics are classic and unique, a combination of form, colour, and texture that creates something of complete beauty. It’s sculpture with function.
It’s no surprise the age-old art of pottery is enjoying a resurgence. Over the past few years of lockdowns, many have been inspired to improve and embellish their homes, and with that has come a renewed obsession with natural materials and craft skills.
A wonderful ceramicist we stumbled upon from Barcelona, Margarita Sala Gashen, uses some unusual firing processes in her work – raku and naked raku firing.
The definition of raku firing is “a firing process in which work is removed
from the kiln at bright red heat and subjected to post-firing reduction (or smoking) by placing in containers of combustible materials, which blackens raw clay and creates cracks in the glaze.” With anything in ceramics, there is not just one way to make raku fired pottery.
Naked raku is a variation of the raku technique in which a slip is applied to the pot before it is placed in the raku kiln. The slip cracks and breaks apart during the firing and is chipped off after to reveal a blackened crackle pattern.
