The sunlight spreads across his workshop in Fonteta, full of clay, shelves, pieces, fragments, and ideas waiting to be crafted. Josep Matés is a potter, passionate about old trades, and happy doing what he likes.
I always felt the need to things with my hands. It made me happy as a child: assembling, disassembling, touching the earth and its materials. I felt at peace.
When did you discover ceramics?
When I was seventeen. School wasn’t for me, so I left and did a training course at the Bisbal ceramic school thinking it might be as it involved manual things. I combined schooling with an apprenticeship in a pottery workshop. The connection was growing, and after a few years I told myself that maybe I could make a living this way.
What do you like most?
Using senses like touch, vision, and intuition. My job allows me to interact with various elements and for me, ceramics isn't a job, but a way of life. I wake up happy thinking about the pieces I have to make and the production process is pleasant for me.
What sets you apart?
From the beginning I set out on a path on which I continue: making the ceramics that I like best, black ceramics, and using fire like always.
The old trades and fire are the backbone of a project you’re doing: the recovery of old furnaces in the Gavarres. You’ve made traditional fired lime tiles and now you’re working on extracting rosin. What did you know about this material?
At Empúries, I learned that rosin was used to waterproof wine jugs so they could be reused. I knew it was a regular activity throughout the peninsula, concentrated in areas with pine trees. I found an expert who told me that it was obtained in the Gavarres. Isidro Tarrés, who lives in the Seu d’Urgell, explained to me that his father went to Súria every winter to work a rosin oven, and I went to Burgos to see the process. The first firing of the rosin will be done at the next Carbonera de Forallac festival in a self-made oven.
How do you get the rosin?
Since the Middle Ages, the system has been this: the rosin must be extracted from the pine trees, then placed in a specific way inside hot clay, and when it’s full, it must be burned. The rosin must burn in a controlled way so the resin falls and moves through an underground tube to a second container due to the effect of gravity. This tar is burned again when it’s still hot until it’s like a gum. Then the heat is smothered and the liquid paste is lowered to a third container to cool. Then we have the final product.
What were its uses?
Poultices were made for people with lung problems, fishermen used it to extract spines from sea urchins, to seal wooden boats, to waterproof ceramics, for ropes and sails on sailboats, to mark livestock, and more. Without knowing how to read or write, people were able to solve many problems in their environment!
What comes after this project?
A glass oven. I know a couple, here. In fact, the historian Pep Matas wrote the book El pont de las dobles about the facts around this bridge in Cruïlles that led to a glass oven.
Why is it so important to recover all these practices in the 21st century?
Because what worked will always work and if no one recovers it, puts it into practice, learns it, and shares it, the knowledge transmitted over the centuries will be lost. We have to preserve this heritage: twenty years from now there will be no direct witnesses.
