origins
An axiom that supports our conception of reality affirms that everything has an origin, a motor cause. This proposition has served both scientists to develop the most sophisticated theories, as well as researchers to solve great mysteries and theologians to demonstrate the existence of divine entities. However, in the world of the human, the capricious will interferes dissatisfied and it is difficult to match it with this determinism. We don't know if the idea of destiny is perhaps just a refined poetic license that adorns our mortal insignificance or perhaps something more.
The potter who writes these lines, who shapes this space and the works that support it, Julián Ortega Durán, has a diverse and complex origin, like all of our species. But if a figure has special relevance for him to have ended up dedicating himself to this trade, it has been his grandfather: Rafael Ortega Porras . From him he inherited not simply the trade —something he would know little about—, but his love for clay. Because when you dedicate your life to your passion, to what gave you some of the happiest moments of your childhood, what you feel is not just satisfaction; it is also affection for what he does, tenderness when seeing his work done and that feeling of being enveloped by a kind of fate.
Rafael knew how to face life and show him that he wanted to be a potter, even though he only had his hands and some happy memories of his childhood in the potteries of Fregenal de la Sierra . That determination —which autononymously here means will— prompted him, after years of insistence and confidence in himself and his loved ones, to fulfill his dreams and be recognized for something as humble as working with clay. A clay that was her language to simply express her concerns and feelings, generally in the form of an idealized woman, whether divine or profane, but with a personality from Extremadura. Because clay is earth and Rafael, master craftsman of this dual material, was inseparably linked to his. And perhaps it is that the potter, for not being able to dissociate between the two, the love he feels for his trade unites him with everything else that is in his land. And with a capital letter: Earth. And those loves are his legacy, my origin and my motivation. Let the earth be mild.