The workshop has been open since 1984. Forty years on the same street, doing the same trade. Irene Molina doesn't buy ready-made materials: she makes her own ceramic clay bodies and her own glazes. She mixes them, tests them, adjusts them. Every batch is hers.
The work has two outcomes. Some pieces she finishes herself: glazed, decorated, fired. Others she stops halfway: first firing, unglazed, unpainted. That is bisque ware, and it is the part of the work that sets this workshop apart.
The raw material of decorative ceramics
Bisque ware is a ceramic piece after its first firing: shaped, unglazed, porous, ready to take paint or glaze. It is the raw material that painters, decorators and craftspeople across the area use to do their work.
Irene is the only one in Onda who makes it by hand. Industrial factories mass-produce ceramic blanks, but artistic bisque ware thrown on the wheel or cast in a mould, in small runs, with irregular and custom shapes, is a different product. This is where the workshop comes in.
When you see hand-painted decorative ceramics around here, chances are the piece itself came from this workshop.
Four decades and three awards
She holds official craft certification from the Comunitat Valenciana (DCA no. 598) and won three craft awards in a row: 2017, 2018 and 2019. The opening hours say more than any diploma: Monday to Friday, morning and afternoon. No Saturdays or Sundays. A production workshop, not a showroom.