The ecstasy of ceramics

As a child, Joan Pere would tell his grandmother that he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up. But when he finished school he had no desire to carry on studying and he started working in a riding school. Until signing up for pottery classes at the age of 19. A profession that has been his life ever since.

“My learning was twofold – in the morning I would learn the theory at school, and in the afternoon I would put it into practice in my mother’s workshop” (the ceramicist Malena Roig). One of the most influential people of Joan Pere’s career is his teacher, Lluís Castaldo. “Meeting him opened up the way for me. He is a very hardworking man, an indispensable figure along with my brother (another ceramicist, Jaume Roig) and my mother. Castaldo is a model for me, not only in ceramics, but in the way he sees life”. As for his mother, he believes it is thanks to her that he learned “to make sacrifices to achieve my objective”.

Japanese ceramics is one of the great passions of Joan Pere Català Roig – that combination of subtlety, fragility and strength all at once. So much so that he spent seven years building his own Japanese kiln, called an anagama, with his own hands. “It’s like pottery – the slower you do things, the more nuances the learning process has”. This is the only kiln of its kind in the Balearic Islands, and one of the ten that exist throughout Spain.

To fire pieces in his kiln, he has to stay awake for 24 hours, controlling the process, putting up to one ton of wood in it. “Firing in the early hours of the morning is very hard, but at the same time it is very intimate. That duality fascinates me”, confesses Joan Pere, who also built his workshop with his own hands, a process that took him three years.

“My brother and I have experienced circumstances under which many people would have left the profession. There was a period when you simply couldn’t sell the pottery, so I had to take a job in a tractor company. I would leave home at eight in the morning, get back at seven in the evening and start making ceramics until one in the morning... I barely lived at all during those years – my partner is a saint, she understood that it was a phase, and one we are gathering the fruits of now, fortunately”.

As well as creating unique pieces, Joan Pere performs more complex processes, such as changing the floor of the Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, or crafting the mosaic of 1,400 tiles that now cover the fountain of Plaça de la Reina, in Palma.

For him, ceramics is about more than just shaping clay; it is also a combination of chemistry and physics in which any variant can make the piece take on one form or another. “Mixing minerals is the most complicated part of ceramics, because it involves some knowledge of chemistry and physics. Many people go to the industrial estate and buy it readymade, but I like to apply formulas and find exactly the right amounts of each element, and use the correct firing temperature. For me, that is the ecstasy of ceramics”, he says.

“When I create my pieces, there is a staggering emotional charge, something technical and familiar, a projection towards the future, a creative intention, a concept”, he explains. He teaches his students that the hands manufacture, but that they are nothing if there is no arm or head. “I teach them to mould using their entire body. The hands are the visible part, but they don’t exist without everything that is behind them”.

Over recent months Joan Pere Català Roig, who is considered the master of ceramicists by his fellow potters on the islands, has [...]

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