Ceramics Making

The Raku (乐) is a traditional oriental technique of making utilitarian pottery. Believed to be native to Korea, but it is in Japan where it has flourished and delighted all who have contact with her. Since the late sixteenth century attracted raku tea masters, influenced by Zen Buddhist philosophy, who felt a peculiar pleasure in this direct and conscious return to the primitive treatment of the clay. During the tea ceremony, the participants drank the tea in pots made by them. The kanji (ideogram, equivalent to word) raku means tranquility, but also "fun" or "happiness".

 Raku Process

The pieces take a small oven to 900 degrees approx. (Depends on gloss enamel or used, temperatures are lower and others to over 1000 degrees). When the glaze reaches its point of cooking is removed in a state of incandescence and carefully deposited, with the help of iron tongs in a container filled with wood shavings (you can also use sheets of newspaper or dried leaves of the tree) . Contact with this method burns the chips, leaves or paper and generates an enormous amount of smoke entering the room and comes to be part of it. The glazes (oxides) have been painted with that provide parts of the oxygen for the combustion, making (reduced) and in pure metal, which gives the characteristic appearance of this pottery. After several minutes, the chemical process is set down suddenly with water temperature. You get the final colors, textures, shapes and colors fascinating and never the same from one room to another, which range from red to crackle metallic, pearlescent and iridescent characteristic of this technique.

The Raku is thus a complex alchemy which involved the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) which are unique pieces, always wonderful.

As it is not surprising that in the process, always manual, any parts breaking, its internal tensions by placing heat or temperature change, the potter Raku does not worry about this, but carefully picks up the pieces and repair the piece to put in a position to use their scars to be seen. The ancient potters of Japan stood out these scars to weld the piece of precious metal and often gave more value to the work thus obtained.