pottery workshop Pottery workshop

Welcome to Shivetice. You're standing in front of a building that at first glance looks like an ordinary, perhaps a few decades old house with an economic part, but its walls are keeping an echo of craft, which has stood here for hundreds of years. Before you is a pottery workshop - a monument to folk production, which combines the work of clay with the daily life of this village in Horehron. Look at the facade: simple, functional, without unnecessary decorations. The windows are smaller, the doors to the workshop larger, so that pots can be carried in the trolleys and raw matter. The roof is covered with shingles or later bricks - depending on when it was repaired - cut the area where the clay was changed in the containers in which it was cooked, stored and celebrated. Let's move closer to the entrance. Notice the threshold. It is wiped out not only by wind and rain, but also by thousands of feet of mist, apprentices, children who have been running around on assignments. The stone or hard brick tile remembers the speed with which it worked here. The clay doesn't wait. When it is flown, it must be processed. When it's dry, it's wet. The workshop's rhythm was given by natural cycles, not by hours of winter. Although the exact dates of the creation of this particular workshop are missing in the archives - chronology remains unknown, architects unknown, the names of owners have been lost in a minute of time - we know that the pot has been cooked in Šivetice for centuries. This building is a physical trace of this tradition, its last, physically preserved witness. They don't look inside, through doors that are closed today, but in the spirit they are always open to your imagination. You don't see any golden ceilings, no frescoes, no statues. There is a raw aesthetic of purpose. There would be a furnace in the center - the heart of every pottery workshop. Although the furnace may physically no longer be here today, or is just a ruin after a chimney, her spirit is here. It was a massive construction made of a baked brick built directly into the ground to keep the temperature a thousand two hundred degrees. Around it would be arranged work tables, wheels, shelves for drying. No official would clean the floor, but dirt, ashes, sand. The air would be cleared with ground, smoke, dry wood and moist clay. It's a fragrance that never produces a perfume -- it's a fragrance of work. The architecture of this workshop is the architecture of the need. The shape language was not dictated by fashion in the city, but by the physics of hot clay and the logistics of raw materials. Thick perimeter walls of quarry stone or brick, plastered with clay plaster, which breathed along with the wall. Ceiling structures made of wood, bearing columns that lasted generations. If you touch the wall now, you feel the coldness of thick material. It's not smooth concrete. It's a material that has its character, its cracks, its shrapnel from trucks, from the impact of a shovel, from time to time. Who worked here? Names are unknown. We don't have any signed works, no credit cards, no portraits of the masterminds. Anonymity is the rule here, not the exception. There was a master who could control the wheel so that a thin, even wall of the mug rose from the clay ball. There were teachers who learned to feel the matter with their fingers, who struggled with the center, with a uniform wall thickness, so that their work would not spoil their drying. There were women and children who prepared clay - wiped it, stirred it with a sand or chamotte, so that it would not become blurry in the fire. There were men who drove wood to the ovens, who guarded the fire for three days and three nights without stopping, fed it with dry beech or oak so that the temperature would rise evenly. Whole families lived here in symbiosis with a workshop. They were sleeping in a neighboring room, getting up before dawn, lying down in the dark. The workshop wasn't just a workplace. She was a house, a school, a border between family and the world. Šivetice was known for its pottery far beyond the surroundings. Markets in Banská Bystrica, in Brezno, in Zvolen - where to import bowls, pots, coffee sets, flower pots, as well as building ceramics - bricks, roof shingles, chimney pipes. The products from this workshop traveled. They had not only the usefulness but also the identity of the place. The ornamentics that were there - simple lines, dots, lines ordered by a pen or comb to a still moist pot - were like a written signature. Each master had his own variety, his own way to load the glaze, how to achieve that specific greenish-gold or brown-green shade that gave natural clay from the surroundings and leaded glaze. Although we do not have documented specific patterns from this particular workshop, we know that the chivetic pot had its face. It was thicker, more resistant, designed for hard work in the field, in the forest, in the kitchen where beans and sour potato soup were cooked. Look at the surroundings. The workshop wasn't in isolation. Around it would be a yard, a drying field, where pots and bowls stood in rows like small soldiers before the battle - a battle with fire in the ovens. There was a storehouse of clay, perhaps a hole where the clay was intertwined, rumbled, improved by characteristics. There was a wooden pile for water, because water is life in ceramics. And there were trees - maggots or oaks - giving shade in July, when the oven up, and the workshop turns into a wreck. Today, maybe there's only grass, once, newer houses. But you're gonna try to disappear now. Listen to the noise of the letters. Count the heat from the stone that soaked the sun all day long. Count the humidity of the air near the river that flows near, giving life to the matter. Here comes the mystery I was talking about at the beginning. Why did this workshop survive before others disappeared? There were several workshops in Šivetice. Some have burned - the furnace is a dangerous neighbor. Others fell because the family moved into the city because the children did not want to learn craft because of factory ceramics, plastics, aluminum. This one stood. Maybe because she was the biggest. Maybe because it was best built. Perhaps because someone put in it a love that is more durable than a brick. We don't know. And this ignorance is a gift. It allows you to fill this workshop with your own paintings. To become the apprentice who's afraid to touch the wheel. To be the master who comfortably heats the furnace at night, listening to how the clay sings in the fire - the typical quiet scratch, when the water changes in a pair, when the structure changes in stone. Note the detail you don't see, but you feel. It's continuity. The hand that touched the same brick today that touched the hand a hundred years ago. Legs that track the same stairs to the attic where the raw materials were dried. Looking through the window at the same top, at the same church in the middle of the village, at the same fields. Time didn't flow linearly. Here