Guray Ceramics and Avanos

We had visited the Guray pottery on a Sunday after the balloon ride, not knowing it was going to be included in the Red Tour on the Monday.  We were shown around by one of the guides, and like a lot of places in this valley the underground has been utilized for a workshop space that just needs to be drilled out to make more rooms.  It really is like a warren, with specialist rooms for throwing, decorating, glazing, many galleries, and lots of passages.

I ventured an inquiry as to whether the management ever has visiting artists work with the potters there, and he was quite enthusiastic in saying that yes, they did.  I would be welcome to come to work with them.  So I met the manager, who is the grandson of the founding father of the Guray pottery and showed him my web site.
He told me I was 'hired' and I arranged to start with the potters on the Sunday.

This is what you see when you walk down the passageway from the front, down into the underground network of studios.

These are the showrooms, and only two of them .... there are much larger ones, full of ceramics.  Every one is hand painted by the artists in the previous photos.  And quite expensive.  Guray pottery has up to 20 tours per day going through in summer and 40 a day during spring and autumn, with people from all over the globe.  Quite a few buy there, and they say they don't sell anywhere else.

I had planned to do a figure of a Turkish woman in her sixties or seventies ...sitting on a throne, as I do.  I had the photos of the Turkish throne...something exotic and ornate, and the photo of the woman that I took in the caravanserai.  This was my take on the Turkish woman who - in my mind - is as worthy of veneration as the Sultan, the mother figure, the unappreciated essential person in Turkish life.   They are the ones who make the carpets, who work in the fields, in the homes, raising the babies, making the handicraft, etc. etc.  Yet they stay behind screens to pray in the mosques, they wear hot coats and scarves all the time out doors in public and are rarely seen out at night.  They are respected though, and don't appear to be in any way concerned that they may be repressed or even think that they are.  It's just my jaundiced western '60's womens liberation generation that I come from.

 I was shown the work place in one of the hand building rooms, with a helper who couldn't speak English, but we got on just fine.   Everyone there was very friendly and anything I needed was found and provide to me ..including hot drinks of apple tea.
About an hour after I had begun my project, I was visited by the manager Guray and the interpreter guide we met the first day we went there.   Through the interpreter, I was asked would I make  a sculpture of the founder of the pottery...(a couple of photos of him were provided.)..and the finished sculpture would be put into a new addition to the studio complex...a museum of Turkish ceramics! I could hardly believe my luck.  I was taken for a tour of the space, which is huge, the entrance and rooms already having been drilled out of the rock on the right hand side of the entry to the studio complex.   They expect the museum to be finished by April of 2012.

Work in progress.  The person in the picture with me is a potter named Tulin Ozyurt, who helped me with translation and getting organised.   A bit more about Tulin in the next post.

So I got stuck into the project and after three days it was done.  Guray was very happy with it and gave me pick of the gallery as a thank you present.   I chose a beautiful plate, later finding out it was worth over two thousand lire (about AUS $1300) and Dirk and I went off to catch a bus to Istanbul, lucky as a couple of ducks.

Now we are in Istanbul and only four days to go before we head off home.  Yee ha!