Performance Pottery

Elaine Ware

For thirteen years during my childhood I had the opportunity to work with clay, enjoying the creativity involved in hand made sculptures, but during those years I had never heard of the raku process. Not until a colleague gave me a raku pot as a house warming gift twenty years later would I be introduced to the porous and irregularly crackled surface of raku ware. My own experience with creating raku occurred a year ago when I enrolled in a pottery course. On the first night of the class, the instructor announced that we would culminate the semester with a raku firing and party; therefore, we were asked to make several pots for that final class. The outward excitement of many of the other potters at the instructor's announcement led me to expect a special event, and I was not disappointed even though my first pot was clearly that of a novice.

My first raku event and the enthusiastic responses of fellow novice potters piqued my curiosity and led to my initial research into raku. Raku pottery, a traditional Japanese art form once practiced by master craftsmen and revered for its honored place within the tea ceremony, has become a serious art in the West with potters receiving high prices from collectors who prize the ware. Parallel to the development of serious raku pottery in the West, however, is a popular cultural tradition of the itinerant potter who provides entertainment opportunities to the general public as they witness and participate in a raku performance. Prior to my reading, I hypothesized that through such parties Westerners bastardized a serious Japanese art form. My research, however, led me to revise that early thinking about the origins of raku entertainments when I learned that in 1911 in Japan that itinerant potters were already offering such experiences at private parties. The potter often becomes a magician, a performance artist, encouraging audience participation as she quickly and magically transforms clay into unusually crackled raku ware. These pottery "happenings" like magic shows, are entertainment that the public enjoys despite ignorance about the process, and they shed light on the primal attraction to fire and performance. This web site takes a multigenre approach to explore the history, aesthetics, performance characteristics, and place of raku (see definition) events within popular culture.

Gift to Author
A raku pot from the Snyder Pottery, Murfreesboro, TN.

Author's novice pot
This is the first raku pot that I made.