Rishtan Blue

About the studio

Rishtan sits on a seam of red clay in the Fergana Valley that potters have worked since the twelfth century. Usto Alisher Nazirov's family kiln still fires with the ishkor glaze — ash of the desert plant burned and ground with quartz — which gives the town's ceramics their impossible turquoise-blue. Plates are thrown, dried in the courtyard, painted freehand with mineral pigments and fired once. No two are alike.