Living with handmade ceramics

A thrown bowl bought in Jaipur or in Stoke tends to end its life on a shelf, admired and unused. That is a misreading of what the object is for. Glaze settles under washing, unglazed clay darkens where hands go, and a pot that never meets food never finishes being made. The useful question is which pieces can take the traffic.

The display instinct is understandable. A thrown bowl costs four or five times what its factory equivalent costs, and the word handmade has come to imply fragility. Neither follows. Most studio tableware sold in India, Britain and Japan is stoneware fired between 1240 and 1280 degrees, and at that temperature the body vitrifies until water absorption falls below three per cent. That is a denser, harder material than a great deal of the glossy earthenware sold as everyday china, which is fired lower and stays porous under its glaze. The expensive object on the shelf is frequently the tougher one. What actually fails in a dishwasher is a narrower list than people fear. Gold and platinum lustre goes first: it is applied over the fired glaze and refired at around seven hundred and fifty degrees, and detergent thins it to a grey shadow inside a year. Unglazed exteriors, common on the current run of pale stoneware, take up detergent and hold a chalky bloom. Low fired earthenware with a crazed glaze draws water into the body through the crazing and eventually smells of it. Matt glazes are the quiet casualty, since barium and lithium matts etch under alkaline detergent and lose their softness after thirty or forty cycles. Most stoneware, most porcelain and any well fitted glossy glaze are simply fine. The wobble is not a fault, or not usually. A pot is trimmed at the leather hard stage, when the foot ring is cut into a wall that is still moving, and the form then shrinks another five to eight per cent in the glaze firing. The spiral left by throwing pulls as the body vitrifies, and a wide low bowl settles onto three points rather than a circle. A maker chooses whether to grind the foot flat afterwards. Many decide the small rock is an honest record of the process and leave it there.

Use produces the other problem, which is breakage. The domestic answer has become replacement, because replacement is cheap and immediate. It is also the point at which most people discover that the repair traditions are older, better and entirely compatible with putting the piece back on the table.

The oldest working answer is the staple. Rivet repair was practised across China and northern India by menders who worked street by street, drilling shallow holes on either side of a break, never through the wall, and setting brass or iron cramps across it under tension as the metal cooled and contracted. The join is visible, structural and dry, with no adhesive anywhere near food. A stapled bowl carries a row of small metal stitches down its side and goes on holding water for decades. Kintsugi is the other tradition, and the version sold in kits is not it. Urushi is the sap of the lacquer tree. It cures by humidity rather than by drying, needs weeks between coats, and gives a proportion of people a rash along the way. The gold is powder dusted onto the last tacky layer, and the adhesive underneath is mugi urushi, lacquer cut with wheat flour. The kits substitute two part epoxy and brass powder, which yellows in daylight, is not food safe at temperature and creeps at the join within a few years. If a bowl is going back into use, staples or urushi. If it is going on a shelf, epoxy is at least honest about being a display repair. At the counter the test is short. Pick the piece up and feel where the weight sits, run a thumb round the foot ring for grinding burrs that will scratch a table, hold the glaze to the light for crazing that is already there, and check the glaze meets the rim without a thin dry band where it will chip. Then use the thing, daily, in rotation with everything else. Glaze takes a soft sheen from cloth and detergent that no kiln produces, and unglazed clay darkens unevenly, mapping the way one particular person holds a cup. That is the object finishing itself, and it cannot happen on a shelf.