Treasure of Nepal - Sample Flip Book

INTRODUCTION
In 2012 I took part in the Kathmandu International Arts Festival and lived for
a month in Patan on the south side of Kathmandu where so many of the craft
workshops featured in this book are located. Everywhere you go in Patan there
is evidence of craft; workshops line the streets, and the sounds of hammering metal
and chipping wood fill the air. Golden statues, wooden and stone carvings, textiles,
jewellery, thangkas and religious artifacts are everywhere. It is an intoxicating world
of work done by hand.
My first profession was ceramics. From childhood I had a fascination with clay and
after leaving university I established my studio on the east coast of England. For 25
years I worked in that studio, a place not unlike the ones in this book. The shelves
were lined with new ideas gestating, old ideas as inspiration, found objects and
raw materials. For many years I worked with porcelain, that finest of white clays
so familiar with the traditions of the East. But soon I started working with red clays,
the natural clays of England, with a strong desire to explore and discover another
world. Each material has its own qualities, its own language of form, its own spirit
and it is the skill of the craftsperson to find that language and connect to that spirit.
The fine white of porcelain that dusted the shelves and surfaces of my studio eventually
became the red dust of terracotta and during that transition I felt a deep
satisfaction from taking a leap into the unknown and finding my way. When the kiln
was opened after a firing and the pots emerged for the first time, I had the feeling
that the gods had played a part in their creation; the intense heat transforming the
cold clay into objects of beauty. The gods in my world were not the gods of a particular
religion or belief. They represented only a level of awareness; an intimacy
and knowledge of the materials I was using, and an intuitive understanding of why
things turn out the way they do. There are no short cuts to be taken in craft. From
beginning to end it requires a full commitment. Awareness is the key.
It takes decades to develop hand-craft skills. Each craftsperson I encountered in
Nepal has been through a long period of training – and an even longer period of
making. The basic techniques used in these studios are much the same as they have
been for hundreds of years. The tools are much the same. In some cases power
tools have replaced the hand tools saving time, but for the most part the artisans