Marisa de Lucas is a potter who manufactures all sorts of pieces, turned pieces, ceramic plates, tiles and reduction and oxidation firing, especially mosaics and ceramic tiling. She masters different techniques, among which the following is noteworthy: lustreware (ceramics with a metallic glaze) of Spanish-Muslim… tradition. 

In the manufacture of ceramics there are two main firing systems for the colouring: with or without oxygen, also known as reduction. Firing without oxygen implies a great knowledge of the chemical elements which make up the colour and the control of the temperatures and the different ways to produce reductions. The Spanish-Muslim pottery-makers researched on ceramics by this means, firing at low temperatures, unlike in other places. This technique is known as “Hispano-Arabic lustreware”. The metals they used for it were oxides from copper, cobalt, manganese and silver and during the firing they made use of smoke to obtain extravagant colours of great beauty. Spanish ceramics achieved great popularity and were one of the most highly valued across Europe. Its influence was so huge that, in the centuries after, a research stream arose from it, which still nowadays is alive within today’s ceramists. 

The rareness of their colours and the enigmatic character of this technique is what drove Marisa de Lucas to investigate it from her early days in the craft, even though, today, the technique has been updated thanks to the new mineral discoveries and the existing refined technology regarding temperature control. Thanks to it, she is able to produce a vast range of colours and nuances, using copper, bismuth, silver, cadmium, selenium, germanium, indium and many other “uncommon” elements.

This lustreware technique or Hispano-Arabic metallic-lustreware is also known as carbonization ceramics, since it is during the firing in a reduction atmosphere (without oxygen) when the metallic oxides lose the oxygen molecules they contain and they acquire, by the effects of carbon, those intense colours which range from the very characteristic metallic sheen, to matt and opaque colours which the old Hispano-Arabic ceramists glimpsed and with which the ceramists of today still dream of.