Stage Raku "Autour du Bol"
A six-day course at the end of which you will drink tea from a bowl that you have shaped, glazed and then fired in the kiln using the Raku technique.
Raku and the Bowl. Raku may be described as a technique for firing clay objects, but it is first and foremost the result of a meeting between a craftsman and a scholar in 16th-century Japan.
While the technique is similar to primitive firing, the mastery of the material has the depth, poetry, fullness and sophistication of the simple thing. The bowl is the symbolic representation of this.
Shaping the bowl from a ball of clay, using only the hand as a tool, remains the most original creative act there is. Pulling the bowl out of the glowing 'maw' of the kiln with a pair of tongs, after the molten glaze has covered it like a skin of magma, is part of the mystery of alchemy, the miraculous and the enchanted. This relationship with matter links us to Nature and awakens us to the Elements.
Raku is a way of opening up to the world, a way of 're-knowing' ourselves. And if we stop to consider the sensations experienced, it is the magic of the volcano. From a fragile, ephemeral object, the fire freezes it for eternity.
The course offers you the chance to create "raku bowls", going through all the stages of such a firing before drinking tea from one of your own bowls at the end of the course.
It can be a discovery, a perception of creation, an understanding of the material or simply a wonderful adventure.