A Trip Around the World in Five Pots

On every trip I take, I have the same goal: Bring home a locally made ceramic. From Mexico City: a cream vase, emblazoned in black with a tropical bird. From Saint-Malo, Normandy: a teal pedestal bowl that was a splurge during a summer abroad in college. From Stockholm, a tiny polka-dotted, cube-shaped dish, discovered at a co-op I came across on Hornsgatan.

Pottery is a craft nearly as old as humankind and one you can find in every corner of the world, from the terra-cotta pots of Nonthaburi, Thailand, to earthenware dishes from Pomaire, Chile. You can easily find modern handmade wares just about anywhere, but for a true pottery pilgrimage, seek out locales where the tradition runs deep, where the history of the place is intertwined with shaping the land into vessels for daily life. Here, we’ve mapped a global tour for potheads that will take you from the rocky ravines of Italy’s boot to the dusty edge of the Sahara Desert and beyond. Just don’t forget to pack an extra bag in which to take your goods home.

La Chamba, Colombia

Lest you think black dishware is a new trend (and you might, based on its popularity in the last few years), the women of La Chamba, Colombia, have been crafting inky, satin-finished pots and tabletop pieces for centuries. The tradition began in this tiny village, located about 100 miles southwest of Bogotá in the Magdalena River valley, between the Colombian Andes. Pijao people made vessels for ceremonial and domestic uses, and today, just over 85 percent of the village’s population is dedicated to the craft, which is one of 28 Colombian agricultural and handicraft products with a protected designation of origin.

The ceramics are made from a combination of three types of clay. Pieces are hand-formed and covered with a red glaze; after a few rounds of drying and varnishing, the pots are then dried in the sun and meticulously polished with agate stones until each pot squeaks. The black color comes not from the firing process, which takes place in metal barrels inside a kiln, but what happens when they’re pulled out. Organic matter like rice husks (or, traditionally, treated donkey manure) gets added to the white-hot barrels to catch fire and is left to smoke as the pots cool. The smoke permeates the pots, leaving a glossy noir finish.

While contemporary ceramists aren’t smoking pots, many produce similarly sleek black pieces. Sumptuous bowls and chubby pitches by Faye Toogood have a similar feel, while Danny Kaplan’s sculptural vases and candlesticks bring a bit of edge to the classic black shade.

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Tamegroute, Morocco

"Moroccan ceramics" likely brings to mind plates and pots painted with bright, intricate symmetrical patterns, the type of eye-catching pieces you’ll see stacked high in shops in Marrakech and Fez. But farther south, in the village of Tamegroute in the Draa River valley on the edge of the Sahara Desert, exists a different, yet still distinctly Moroccan pottery tradition that dates back to the mid-1600s. Seven families in this village of 6,000 have carried on a ceramics craft that produces earthenware glazed in emerald green.

Tamegroute ceramics begin with taligit, a clay dirt extracted from holes up to 30 feet deep along the banks of the river. It’s flushed with water and massaged on a mat of palm fronds before being formed into pots on a manual pottery wheel. The vessels are left to dry in the sun for three days before being glazed. You can find a range of shades today, but the famous green hue comes from a mixture of manganese, barley flour, and a type of local rock found in nearby mines, as well as the natural copper in the clay. Traditional kilns are fueled with palm branches, resulting in a striking, uneven coloring; modern solar-powered kilns, recently constructed in the village by the government, create a less authentic, more uniform glaze.

The combination of the rural firing conditions and the alchemy of the natural glaze means you won’t find ceramics like these anywhere else, but imperfect, high-gloss pieces like Niko June’s chunky pitchers and candlesticks and Casa Veronica’s rustic earthenware dishes call to mind a similar artistry.

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Grottaglie, Puglia

Jackson Pollock has become synonymous with splatter-painted art, but the idea of speckling a surface with pigment existed long before the abstract expressionist ever touched a paintbrush. In Grottaglie, Italy, a tiny town (population 32,000) in Italy’s bootheel known as the city of ceramics, potters have used the smamriato, or schizzato, method for centuries as a way to gussy up less-than-perfect pieces. While contemporaries like Utility Objects, maker of delightfully dotted mugs and tumblers, artfully splatter paint on new pots, ceramists used to disguise defects in the enameling by dripping paint from thyme or olive branches onto the surface.

The abundance of red clay in and around the ravines of Grottaglie led to the production of earthenware in the region as far back as the Middle Ages. Today, the town boasts not just ceramics workshops but a ceramics district that’s home to a ceramics museum as well as more than 50 shops and galleries, some built into natural caves along the Saint George ravine, most owned by the same family for generations. The art of splatterware has spread far beyond Puglia, with speckled finds coming out of kilns in Buenos Aires (OWO’s inkblot-dappled mugs and bowls), Brooklyn (Helen Levi’s rainbow-confettied dishes dot the open shelves of Instagram kitchens), and beyond. You’ll find every shade of splatter imaginable today, but traditional Pugliese pieces featured green—a design choice, it’s said, that also distinguished the region’s wares from other Italian ceramics.

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Imbe, Okayama Prefecture, Japan

Bizen ware takes its name from Bizen City in the Okayama Prefecture, located on the Inland Sea of Japan, where the traditional stoneware originated in the sixth century in the Imbe township. The wabi-sabi, unglazed nature of the pottery gives the impression that pieces are created with fewer steps than other ceramics, but in reality, the process involves fastidious planning and can take over a year. First, artists must make their clay. The main ingredient is hiyose, a fine and sticky soil found under the rice beds in Imbe, which artists often mix with black mountain soil from the region. The clay is left to sit for anywhere from a few weeks to a few years until it obtains the right texture. (Toyo Kaneshige, the seminal Bizen ceramist who revived traditional techniques in the early 20th century, is said to have let his clay age for 10 years).

Because hiyose clay can take an extremely high temperature, the firing process is slow and meticulous, taking up to two weeks, as the ceramist carefully raises the temperature over a period of days using red pinewood as fuel. (It’s so labor-intensive, it only happens once or twice a year.) The unique, earthy coloring—ranging from brick red to bronze and cream striped with crimson—comes from a variety of chemical reactions, as well as a pot’s location, inside the kiln. Falling ash creates a speckled goma pattern, while pieces wrapped in rice straw develop a vermillion hidasuki motif where the straw burned. The dark gray sangiri style occurs in pieces placed on the floor, which become partially covered in ash.

More than 100 potters and galleries operate in Bizen today—some practicing traditional techniques, others using modern advancements like electric kilns—but the wabi-sabi ethos is honored by ceramists around the world. You can find it in rustic brown vases by Los Angeles–based Veronica Morris; a patinaed dish by Clair Catillaz with spots resembling the botamochi Bizen ware style; and the chunky brick-like vessels of Jonathan Cross. 

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Horezu, Romania

Ceramics tradition in Horezu, Romania, a 6,000-person hamlet in the southwest region of the country, is tied closely to the construction of the monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in 1690. Prince Constantine Brancovan brought artisans to the area to create decorative works and murals for the building—a school of painting was established in the 18th century—and it was these craftsmen who likely made the first pieces of Horezu ceramics. The pottery is made using clay extracted from a singular hill, while the glazing colors are made by mixing different local materials with kaolin; ruseala, an iron-rich soil from a nearby village, makes for a warm, reddish brown that’s one of the traditional colors, along with cobalt blue, green, and ivory.

Horezu ceramics stand out for their intricate decoration. Each piece is shaped with a particular finger technique, then adorned with patterns and motifs that are still, to this day, created with traditional tools like wild boar bristle brushes and hollowed ox horns with a goose feather tip to make the delicate patterns. A wire-tipped guide stick is often used to make a streaked, marbleized motif resembling peacock feathers—a technique that could be considered a predecessor of the swirling patterns seen in ceramics from California-based Noelle Hiam and Henry Holland in London. The tradition’s spiritual beginnings show up in common symbols like the tree of life, and the Horezu rooster, a symbol of resurrection and immortality that’s celebrated in an annual festival.

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Don’t forget to carefully pack your treasures

You’re in Sicily and you went a little wild buying ceramics—a few pasta bowls, some dessert plates, a vase you couldn’t leave behind. You depart the artist’s shop thrilled with your finds only to wonder: "How on earth will I get these precious pieces home?" Paul Speh, fine arts packer at the Brooklyn Museum, who has safely transported everything from dinosaur bones to works by Degas in nearly 30 years in the business, offers a few tips to ensure your new collection makes any journey, whether transatlantic or down the block, unscathed.

1. Stuff it out: Cap each end of a ceramic piece with a "bird’s nest" made by folding your packing material in on itself until it’s a circle. Speh recommends tissue paper, but T-shirts or scarves work just as well. Then pack around the item, being careful to avoid putting pressure on sensitive areas like handles. As for filling hollow items like teapots or glasses with stuffing, use your best judgment. There’s an instinct to fill a delicate porcelain vase with stuffing to protect the thin walls, but can you get your hand in and out of its narrow mouth to remove the stuffing safely?  

2. Give it space:  "Overpressure is the death of ceramics," says Speh, so no tight wrapping or overpacking. You want to create about two inches of fluff with air pockets around the artwork—use crumpled-up newsprint or unfolded clothes—so the piece has a bit of breathing room but is still protected against vibrations. And absolutely do not sit on your suitcase to close it. 

3. Mind the material: "There’s a hierarchy of fragility in ceramics, with unfired clay being the most fragile," says Speh. An everyday solution to protect these surfaces from abrading? Plastic wrap. It also works well for delicate finishes, like hand-painted porcelain. "I’ve wrapped a Ming vase with Saran wrap," says Speh. "It clings to the curvature of pieces so gently."

4. Carry it on: Keep your cargo in the cabin of the plane with you, but don’t stuff it into your soft-sided backpack or tote it around in the paper bag you left the shop with. Opt for a hard-shell suitcase. "They are equivalent to some cases we use in the industry for shipping," says Speh.

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