An inspirational trip to Japan
At the beginning of the year of 2017 I’ve travelled to Japan to visit my older sister Inês (whom by the way is a very talented artist so do yourself a favour and check here her amazing work!). She was studying for her architecture master thesis in Tokyo so I met her there. We visited the enormously crowded Tokyo, the sweet deers of Nara, the quiet and beautiful Kyoto and the white mountains of Nagano with the best snow I’ve ever skied in. Everything about this trip fascinated me. The delicious food (which is for sure what I miss the most), the peace that is felt right in the middle of the noisy cities, the mysterious people and the intriguingly curious culture. But the main thing these cities had in common that fascinated me from minute 1 was tea and its inherent rituals.
During this trip I was in University and I knew already that we were supposed to do a project that consisted of designing a tea or coffee tableware set. As soon as I arrived in Japan I knew I had to design a tea set as everything about tea and its rituals caught my attention immediately. As I walked and observed every little corner of Japanese tea stores and ceramic studios, which were literally everywhere, as a good Portuguese I am I immediately started to touch everything and to collect a lot of pictures. I’ve searched a lot about the tea rituals and its origins and started to think about my project back in University.
Once I arrived in Portugal, I sketched and sketched, submersed in all the influences I saw regarding tea, teapots and Japanese nature, and somehow I came up with a draft design of what is now the ameno teapot. Firstly, it was merely a white body with a peculiar wood side handle. The handle that differentiates it so much and consequently the rest of the collection, started as a wish to design a teapot with a side handle like the traditional Japanese "kyūsu". It was in my final exam that one of my project teachers suggested that I should rethink the handle because left-handed people couldn’t properly pour the tea. I immediately changed the handle to the back of the teapot and it stayed that way until a year ago when I did a course in design applied to ceramics at Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.
As the exercise was to design a tableware ceramic piece, I chose to redesign my teapot that in some way never seemed to be finished for me. I solved some problems the previous design had and explored a little bit more its forms and volumes and I ended up with a completely different result except for the handle detail that had turned out to be an irreplaceable detail of this teapot. Later on, when I decided to design and craft ceramics for a living, I redesigned it once again and the whole ameno collection that evolved around it. It is amazing to look back at this journey and realize that everything started from my trip to Japan and the tea rituals I´ve discovered.
The collection’s name ameno came from the sensation of softness and tranquillity by drinking tea and the touch of a finished piece.
Hope you found the story of the ameno teapot and the ameno collection interesting. I think the story of the processes is what protects us designers and makers from being replaced. Once I am designing something (ceramics related or not) I usually do research on the products that are already in the market so that I don’t make the mistake of designing something that looks alike someone else’s work. Also, I believe that creativity needs to flow from something other than what we are designing and that is why when I am designing something, I try not to get inspiration from other ceramic pieces and rather get it from nature, thoughts, incidents, cultures, people or places I’ve visited. It turns out to be a much more rewarding job to design something unique, and that is what I try to achieve every day!
Shop the originator of the entire ameno collection below!
