ABOUT US
Zaira Zarotti & Francesco Pettenà, Potters e Founders of The Freaky Raku Studio. Zaira is the author of The Freaky Table blog and her work mostly consists of still life photography and food styling. She’s always looking out for objects and materials that are vintage and out of the ordinary, and she personally takes care of the styling of her pictures. [read more here]
Searching for props
to this purpose was the first reason she became interested in a personalized production of ceramics. Since the beginning of this project, Francesco found his most authentic expressive quality in molding and finishing the pieces at the lathe, having an inborn plastic talent and a natural creative exuberance of his own. Zaira & Francesco take care of all stages together, each one having one’s own tasks, from production to selling all over the world. The Freaky Raku project was born officially in 2016, after about one year of studying and experimenting as self-tought ceramists in our studio near Venice. DESIGN
Our design is a contemporary and unique revisitation where some elements of the Japanese “wabi-sabi” aesthetic tradition merge with an elegant and sober style, natural materials and neutral colors as Scandinavian main traits. PHILOSOPHY
Nothing is perfect – Nothing stays forever – Nothing is incomplete: beauty is linked with the transience of things and with the effect of time. We found a perfect example of this kind of aesthetic in Raku ceramics; from the first time we learned about it, we've loved this technique and its firing process, which is something like an event where all the primordial elements such as water, wind, earth and fire combine together in an equilibrium that is given both by a bit of chance and a bit of chemistry. The impossibility of perfectly foreseeing the results is, in fact, part of this technique. Raku is not simply making objects, it’s an ongoing experimental process that is viscerally linked to Nature. The “freaky raku” is a project about the search for beauty that can be found in the uniqueness of anything that is not perfect. Every object has its own story, its own time and its own soul.