English
Valencian ceramics descend from the Andalusi tradition. This is not a demonstration to watch: it is a real wheel, with your hands in the clay.
A potter's wheel session with a ceramist from the comarca, in the garden of a 16th-century manor estate. It is not a demonstration watched from a chair: everyone sits at the wheel, centres their own clay and raises their own piece.
Valencian ceramics descend from the Andalusi tradition, and this comarca has been making them for centuries. Workshops are still working half an hour from the estate. One of those ceramists restored the Virgen de los Desamparados painted on ceramic on the façade of this house, two centuries old and unsigned.
You learn the part that is hard to learn: centring the clay, which is the one step nobody skips; opening it without losing the centre; and raising the wall without it collapsing. The first piece comes out crooked. The second, less so. That is the whole lesson.
Whatever you make, you keep. Clay and materials are included, and no previous experience is needed, nor anything to bring.
The work is done outside, in the 4,500 square metres of garden, under the century-old fig tree when the weather allows. The experience is offered on the estate itself and is meant for the group staying there, which is always a single one: the house is let whole, for seven to fourteen people.
