Almost everyone who reaches Oaxaca ends up in front of a case of black pottery. Pierced pieces, vases, bells, figures, with a deep gloss that looks like glaze and is not. They are bought as an ancient valley tradition. They are half that: the clay is very old; the shine is about seventy years old and has an author with a name.
01 A clay that was black without shining
The colour comes from no paint and no dip. It comes from the local clay and, above all, from how it is fired: the piece is baked with little oxygen, starved of air, and that reducing firing leaves the clay dark all the way through. Break it and it is still black inside.
For generations that clay had one very specific use. Large jars were made to store and carry liquids, mezcal included, which travelled across the valley from the distilleries to the villages inside vessels of this clay. They were haulage objects: thick, tough, with no decorative intent. And they looked matte and greyish, not the mirror black of today's display cases.
02 A quartz stone and a cooler kiln
In the 1950s, in a village workshop, Rosa Real Mateo de Nieto tried two changes at once. The first: rubbing the surface of the vessel with a quartz stone just before the piece finished drying, to compress the clay and close its pores. The second: firing it afterwards at a slightly lower temperature than usual.
What came out of the kiln was not dull grey but glossy black, with a lustre that looks glazed and carries not a drop of glaze. The whole effect lives in the surface compressed by the quartz, which returns the light instead of absorbing it.
The find stayed within the family for a few years and then spread through the whole village. Doña Rosa went on working in her workshop, showing the process to whoever came by, until her death in 1980; her descendants keep the workshop going in the same house.
03 The price of the shine
Here is the part hardly anyone tells you in the shop. Firing at a lower temperature gives the shine, but leaves the piece more brittle. Burnished black clay is noticeably more fragile than the old working clay, and no longer does what it used to do: it will not take the knocks of carrying water or the weight of a full jar.
The change in the material brought a change in the catalogue. Where there were once jars and cooking pots, today the village makes whistles, flutes, bells, masks, lamps and animal figures, made to be looked at. Many pieces are pierced by hand: dozens of holes opened in the belly, unthinkable in a vessel that had to hold water.
The object did not get better or worse. It changed jobs: it left the yard and went into the display case.
04 What to look at before you buy
- Look at the shine up close, not from across the roomBurnishing gives an uneven lustre, with the marks left by the stone. A perfectly uniform shine is usually a varnish applied afterwards.first thing
- Check the black goes all the way inLook inside the mouth of the vessel. The colour from reduction firing runs through the whole body; a piece painted on the outside gives itself away at the rim and the base.the easy test
- Do not buy it to hold liquidThe burnished piece is decorative. If you want a working vessel, ask for clay fired hot: more matte, and considerably tougher.important
- Pack it as if it were glassIt is more fragile than ordinary ceramic, and pierced pieces more so. In hand luggage, and wrapped, if it fits.for the flight
05 What actually changed
It is easy to tell this as a story of loss: a useful clay turned into a souvenir. That would be unfair. Once plastic and aluminium arrived, the water jar was doomed anyway; what the shine did was give the workshop a reason to go on existing after its function had gone.
It is also worth noting who did it. Not an outside designer, not an official programme: a village potter trying things in her own yard, and the change spread workshop by workshop, without a patent or a school. In a state where each valley solved its own problems alone, that way of innovating is very recognisable.
Which is why it is worth going into the village rather than buying only in the city. The piece is the same; what changes is that there you see the gesture: the hand rubbing quartz against still-damp clay, which is all there is behind seventy years of display cases.
