Okuyama House
Okuyama House is Francis Bliven and Yufuko Kurioka. Francis is a potter. He began at Santa Fe Clay in 2006, taught the wheel there, then taught at The Potters Studio in Berkeley; he came to Japan in 2019 and has built kilns here since. He throws, and he teaches the way he was taught to draw — a rigorous method that stays out of your way, so that what comes out is yours.
Yufuko trained in tea and flowers. She taught for years on the West Coast — Japanese, Buddhist texts, tea, yoga — and organised tea and pottery workshops there before the two of them moved from California to these hills. She makes vessels, and she teaches how to read one the way tea practice teaches it: the whole form first, then the parts, then the foot, where the maker's hand and the fire's path show plainest.
We fire together, in a soda kiln we designed and built: gas, with charcoal, wood ash and soda given to the flame over eighteen hours, and clay we dig, refine and blend ourselves. Where a pot sits in the kiln is a decision; what the fire does with it is not. About a fifth comes out as we hoped. The rest is surprise, in both directions, and the surprises are why we fire this way.
Some pots stop the eye from across the room. The quiet ones are the ones we pick up again.
The house grew out of a question — how the solitary work of making connects with the world, and how we want it to — and a wish for a place where life and art are the same thing.
