Raku Pottery Summer 2019

I was able to take another raku workshop this past summer. This time I planned ahead with slip trailing and different forms.

Raku pottery is traditionally a Japanese teabowl pottery process where a handbuilt, porous vessel is fired at a lower temperature with lead glazes and pulled from the kiln while red hot to cool in the open air in a quick reduction process. The Americanized version of Raku, or Western Raku, keeps the same rapid heating and cooling of the piece, but pots are put into bins of combustible materials for a carbonization effect, and other techniques are used to create more detail or variations in color to the pot. The main design considerations for Raku include copper glazes, crackle glazes, naked raku, horsehair raku, and wax resist.