Verse • Décor Plate

Pink clay from Valencia, fired twice. The first firing sets the form. The second happens in a traditional reduction kiln, starved of oxygen with rosemary leaves, forcing the metallic oxides in the glaze to bond directly to the surface. This is lustreware, a technique so particular to its conditions that no two firings ever produce exactly the same result.

The result shifts with the light. Not a coating. A transformation of the material itself.

This technique has been practised in this region for over a thousand years. Today only a handful of makers still know how to do it.

This is what Glenn Adamson, in Fewer Better Things*, calls 'material intelligence'; a knowledge that lives not just in the hands, but in an understanding of how clay responds to heat, how fire behaves without oxygen, and how a surface that cannot be entirely controlled is precisely what makes it irreplaceable.