Although my workshop is now in Melbourne, I have a home in a small rural town near Granada, in the south of Spain. This is where slow living derives its real meaning. In this village people still go to work on a donkey, eat the seasonal produce of what they grow, bottle excess harvest and have their own olive crops crushed into a small olive oil production that lasts the whole year. Life has been that way for the last few hundred years.
Going back over a couple of decades, well before this time in the south, when I was in my teens, I moved from my natal Madrid to London to train in Ceramic Design at Harrow College of Art. It was there, in my twenties, where my first ceramics studio was established, I was then employed by the Royal Academy of Art’s drawing workshops, that toured to schools all over the UK.
Currently I am based in Melbourne, because I find it the best place to create and make work. In my studio, which is in a bungalow behind my home, I make ceramic work that blends the slow life of my loved Andalusia with the rigorous training in contemporary craft practice I received during my formal education. In my work I incorporate ceramics, silversmithing, drawing and water colour to explore the poetic possibilities of porcelain.
https://www.pilarrojas.net/