Two makers in a converted kiln house, cutting several hundred holes into each vessel by hand — because a punched lattice never looks like a pierced one.
Founded 2016Two makers
Studio Yun occupies the ground floor of a kiln house on the edge of the old town, where the walls are built from discarded saggers and the lane outside is pale with broken shards. The building was used for firing until the 1990s; since then it has been a workshop, and the two makers who run it have kept the proportions of the place — a long bench, a north window, and a kiln at the far end behind a curtain.
Piercing is the whole studio's discipline. A vessel is thrown, dried to leather hardness, then marked out with a metal divider and pierced hole by hole through a wall barely two millimetres thick. Nothing is punched or moulded: each opening is cut and then eased, which is why the lattice varies subtly from piece to piece and never repeats exactly, even when the same form is made twice.
Everything is fired once, at cone 10, in reduction. Roughly a fifth of each batch will not survive the drying or the firing, and the makers can tell within minutes of opening the kiln which pieces are worth keeping. A large pierced vessel can take most of a day to cut; if it tears at the last hole, it starts again.
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