Ceramics that teach us how to live

• • Encarna makes tableware for haute cuisine restaurants
• • She specialises in oriental ceramics for the millenary tea ceremony
• • She draws her inspiration from the Zen influence on art and craftsmanship

Encarna Soler lives and works between Benissa and Senija, two idyllic villages in Alicante, Spain. She produces tableware for haute cuisine restaurants, including Bon Amb, Quique Dacosta and +Qi, among others. She specialises in making chawans, the bowls used for the green tea ceremony, and chai-res, the small boxes to preserve it in powder form. After training in Raku techniques with artisans José Antonio Sarmiento, Jean Francois Dolorme and Ingrid Lilligren, she improved her salt, soda and anagram kiln firing techniques with ceramicist Gregory Miller. He perfected her chawans and chai-res manufacturing processes with master Minoru Suzuki. Now, alongside her studio work, she teaches ceramics at her local gallery and has also been a guest lecturer at The Manises School of Ceramics in Spain as well as other centres in Denmark, Mexico and Belgium. In 2015, she won the gold medal at the Mungyeong Traditional Tea Bowl Festival in South Korea for a Shino glazed chawan she later exhibited at the Ceramics Museum of Barcelona.