Create Stunning Pottery with Kazu Oba
Soulcrafter Kazu Oba is a Japanese pottery and sculpture artist based in the Rocky Mountains.
What You'll Get
Hands On Education - You'll spend 3 hours with Kazu learning about the history, theory, and practice of his art. Together you'll decide on the piece that you'll co-create.
Take Home Your Art - Whether you're looking for a piece for your home or the perfect gift, your creation is yours to keep, display, and share. You'll also get to take home a piece of pottery handcrafted by Kazu.
Throwing Techniques of Southern Japan
Description - Kazu will share his experience and knowledge of the pottery techniques he studied in the Karatsu region of Southern Japan. Instruction will cover techniques like working clockwise, throwing off the hump, and working with the pottery tools of the Karatsu region. Kazu will also share his experience working in European studios, in countries such as Germany and Denmark, and the underlying philosophies of making pots in different cultures. Firing will be by cone 10 reduction.
Cost - This experience will take place in Kazu's studio at a cost of $200 per person. The maximum group size is 4 people. We require a $25 deposit to reserve your class.
Kazu Oba at work in his studio.
About Kazu
Kazhito Oba apprenticed under Takashi Nakazato in Karatsu, one of the oldest ceramic centers in Kyushu, Japan. Kazu is trained to produce functional ware for everyday use. He maintains studios in Arvada, Lafayette and Boulder, and utilizes electric, gas, salt and wood kilns. Kazu has been cooking as a professional chef for over fifteen years, and is always improving upon the relationship between pots and the food that's served in them.
According to Kazu:
When I work with pottery, as I have done for years, I can feel how the constant spinning motion creates a space within the vessel that has the potential to be filled with food, water, flowers.
Just as all pots are moving toward a potential ideal of symmetry and line, so my sculptures are stirring toward an ideal of shape. Squares and circles emerge and blend, but they are always imperfect, incomplete, and flowing into each other.
Imperfection is essential, and is one reason I work with wood and rock. I have to create around knots and craggy surfaces; the sculptures move toward perfection but remain incomplete.
They wait. Their incompleteness invites collaboration with us who see the potential ideal, the possiblefulfillment of their empty spaces. In this sense, the medium is secondary. My sculptures are composedof the unnamed stuff possible in the meeting of the medium and us. They contain what we bring to them.
Perhaps we may find a different kind of sustenance to fill the spaces within these vessels, something that, in returning to us, may nourish another part of our selves and give us a glimpse at an unfamiliar kind of perfection.
“A beautiful
dish
Empty—
Like a flower
almost to bloom
Is nothing yet but waits.”