RITISH
COLUMBIA
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LOVE AR7?

Call for Entries

The annual Filberg Festival takes
place in the Comox Valley on
Vancouver Island.

July 29 through
August 1, 2011

This event attracts SERIOUS
shoppers (some wholesale and
gallery buyers too) looking
for quality, handmade Canadian
art and craft.

Darrel Hancock Pottery

Filberg Heritage Lodge & Park
61 Filberg Road, Comox, BC

Make 2071 your year
to promote your work to an
educated & discerning clientele.

Booth fee reductions
available for students!
Applications for the 2071 Festival
are available on line at
www.filbergfestival.com/
pdf/2011JuryApp.pdf; participants
will be juried on February 26, 2071.

www. filbergfestival.com

For more information

phone 250-334-9242 or email:
info@filbergfestival.com

Celebrating in Korea:
tea bowl & celadon festivals

By Heather Hannaford, North Peace Potters' Guild

Throughout the summer months, South
Korea is the home of festivals. The Korean
people attend them in their thousands. While
in Korea in 2008 visiting my daughter, we
joined these thousands at the Mungyeong
Chatsabal (tea bowl) Festival, and experienced
a chance meeting with Arthur Park, and
his wife Mary. Arthur is an American of
Korean descent; a potter, tea bowl maker, tea
enthusiast and a promoter of Korean ceramic
history and culture. This meeting was to have
a profound effect on my life.

In 2009, as a result of the Parks’ encourage-
ment, I exhibited with an international group
of ceramic artists at the weeklong International
Celadon Festival and then joined the Parks
countrywide tour the following week. The
journey began in Gangjin City, located
about 350 miles south west of the capital,
Seoul. A cradle of celadon, Gangjin holds the
cultural event in August every year “to inspire
descendants with the spirit of traditional
arts,” explains a Gangjin community profile.
The celadon from Gangjin is referred to as
“the best under heaven.”

Starting to write this short article, I am
overwhelmed with remembered images:
making my own way to Seoul, my exhibition
piece packed in my carry-on luggage, meeting
the group, the bus journey from the north to
the south of the country to Gangjin. In Korea,
behind each mountain is another mountain.
We passed many.

‘The festival is set in what appears to be a
celadon park or centre, home of the celadon
museum, beautifully landscaped and treed. It
has its own kiln, fired ceremoniously during
the festival. Even the light standards are
celadon,

We were welcomed as guests of the City of
Gangjin for a week. Our work was shown,
along with that of Korean exhibitors, in
the main lobby of the wonderful festival
building. The accompanying professionally-
prepared exhibition catalogue is now a
prized possession. Each day, international
participants attended two half-day workshops
with top Korean ceramists. Interestingly
they were all men, though women were well
represented both in the exhibition and among
the ceramic students we met.

‘The tea bowl aesthetic was well represented

at the workshops. Different approaches were
demonstrated. We even made tea bowls,
somewhat amateurishly on my part, on the tall
narrow foot-driven Korean wheel. Traditional
Onggi work—such as kimchi pots—and the
work of younger, more experimental potters
were shown and discussed. We learned to
carve the designs for inlay on traditional
celadon vases: cranes, trees and clouds, At one
of the local exhibition booths, I also learned
to make kimchi, the traditional peppery
fermented cabbage, a staple at Korean meals.

In South Korea, tea bowls are intended to
last a lifetime. They are made in two sizes using
similar styles. There are large, deeper bowls
as well as smaller ones, some almost one-sip
size. Unlike what I have learned by viewing
Japanese tea bowls, those in Korea tend to
have shape criteria: a curved bowl, sometimes
with a slightly flared top edge, without straight
sides, evenly thrown and with a small wheel-
trimmed foot. I understand that they are fired
to about Cone 8. They are glazed with a range
of celadon, generally finely made and pale
iron green. Celadon, however, is not limited
to this pale green jade colour and can range
tight through to what we in North America
might recognize as tenmoku. One also sees

Continued on Page 12,
Celadon range

Korean teabowl throwing demonstration by
Myung Jae Hyun—it took about 20 seconds!

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter « February 2011

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