Matthias Kaiser – Shigemori Mirei Chawan

This bowl was coated in several layers with a special engobe (cracked slip). One component of the engobe is a kaolin clay from Benin that Matthias Kaiser brought back from his stays in West Africa. It produces finer cracking in the engobe and a lively surface through impurities in the kaolin. After the first firing the bowl was sanded and treated with iron ore, then glazed with a colourless glaze made from feldspar, reed ash and wood ash. The painting was applied with manganese.

The name of the bowl refers to the Japanese landscape architect Shigemori Mirei, who created a characteristic garden with stones arranged in a checkerboard pattern.

Matthias Kaiser’s matcha bowls are one-of-a-kind pieces and therefore have collector’s value.

Matcha chawan are tea bowls for green powdered tea (matcha). The tea is whisked directly in the bowl with a bamboo whisk and then drunk from it. The bowls are functional sculptures. Many details are carefully considered in their making, details that usually only reveal themselves after a longer engagement with the culture of tea drinking. The choice of clay body and glaze materials is significant, as are the timing of the forming process, the nuances of the form, the gesture of the making, the tools used and the traces they leave, and not least the firing.
Matthias Kaiser trained as a potter in Japan and regularly exhibits his work there as well. These tea bowls reflect his more than 30 years of working with these forms.

All bowls are made from an unrefined, natural clay from the Czech Republic, which Matthias Kaiser prepares himself in his studio for use. This clay has a high iron content and contains natural deposits of quartz and limonite that give the surfaces a distinctive character.