JOURNAL

Can a colour be still? The kind of peaceful stillness you feel when you watch clouds pass by. This feeling; can it be harnessed on a surface? If it is at all possible, perhaps it’s within the elusive green of Celadon.    Over a thousand years old, Celadon is a kind of pottery that originated in China though evolved in Korea between 918 to 1392. Known since then for the very specific colour created by its glaze, Celadon is fired at high temperatures - 1300oC to be exact - for 24 hours in order to bring out this special hue....

The Earthpiece Journal goes to India, where in a small town at the base of the Himalayas the importance of place is fundamental to the practice of Kullu handweaving.   Surrounded by snow-capped mountains descending into a river and an area rich in spiritual history, it’s no coincidence that the Kullu Valley is known as the Valley of the Gods. Positioned in the north of India in Himachal Pradesh, Kullu is also isolated and very cold, leading to a unique specialisation in the region.    Using wool from locally reared pashmina goats, sheep and angora rabbits, the people of the...

The Earthpiece Journal looks at chasen from Japan, the ornate yet robust companion to your matcha-drinking endeavours.   The way these whisks are made hasn’t changed in over 500 years, which can’t be said for most things. Lightweight yet laden with history, technique and hours of work, each chasen, as it’s called in Japanese, is a tool as much as it is a piece of art. Varying from 16 to 120 spines, each whisk is made from one piece of bamboo that’s painstakingly split and curved on one end to form the whisk.   Essentially this is a traditional bamboo...

For the first instalment of the Earthpiece Journal, we’re perusing the birthplace of SUPERDUPER with an ode to Florentine marble paper.    Flicks of paint dropping into a bath, and then transferred to paper. At its simplest form, this is the humble process behind the opulence that is Florentine marbling, or carta marmorizzata. The result is that not only are no two papers the same, the different countries that marble do so in their own way. In Japanese Shuminagashi, hues are more discreet and tonal while in Turkish Ebru brighter shades bounce around the sheets of paper, not unlike in the...