An early Christmas present for me.

It was with some trepidation that I started scraping away the mortar from the bricks of the stoke hole and side door, as during the firing I had seen areas of glaze apparently lifting off the surfaces of some of the pots at the front of the kiln and by the sidestoke hole. When this has happened previously the glaze has landed on the kiln shelves, melting there, and leaving bare scars on the sides of the pots. In contrast to my usual contemplation of the pack and firing while I waited for the kiln to cool down, imagining the results I might achieve, I tried to put it out of my mind.

The first view I had was of the front. Apart from an obviously crawled piece to the right, the setting looked surprisingly good. As I unbricked the side door and began unpacking the back chamber I realised that, for the most part, it had been a very successful firing. My excitement grew as I realised that I was unpacking some of the best pieces I have got out of a kiln.

The ashing was good throughout, and though there seemed to be less obvious effect from volatiles (potassium) on the work, there was a good sense of drame through most of the pack.

This quick pic shows one of the pieces from the front of the firebox, with heavy ash runs and some stunning colour.

All wrapped up ready for christmas

The kiln was lit yesterday morning at 7am, before dawn. Svend Bayer drove over in the fog to help me with the firing + experience the relatively short firing.

It was a beautiful firing - slow rise to red heat, reduction started at 3pm and a steady climb to 1250C. Cone 6 was over by 7pm and cone 8 was over at the front by 9pm.

By midnight cone 9 was over front and back and cone 10's were soft. Svend took the 3am shift and by the time I got up cone 10's were down throughout and cone 11's were looking soft. Often the morning sees pretty concentrated work nudging the kiln out of its overnight slumber and coaxing it up in temperature, but today it was lively and raring to go. Cone 12's were down by 12.30pm, the embers were raked away from th front of the pack and the kiln soaked for an hour. By 1.45 everything was clammed up and it was time for a celebratory ale to toast the firing.

Fingers crossed for equally good results! It's going to be a long weekend......

Just in time....

.....before Christmas and (hopefully) before the real cold weather arrives. The kiln is packed and bricked up. All wood cut and split, with this lovely big pile of finer stuff to start off and to use if the temperature rise sticks.

The starting day is Wednesday, so fingers crossed for reasonable weather. Svend Bayer is coming to help me fire, which is great - especially as he likes the 3am shift (my least favourite).
I have a whole pack of new forms and plenty of new glazes. Many of these are from the last place I collected from - The Malvern Hills - using the oldest rocks in England. I also have some new variations of Galloway glazes that came out exceptionally well in the last small kiln firing.

A hint...

Just a hint of new work that will be going into the next firing.

Layers of darker clays and pale slips that will hopefully provide a varied backdrop to the glazes that will go on top.






These are a very coarse body that I
make up using a secondary kaolin that has derived from Dartmoor granite, and is particularly prone to cracking in the bisque. Solution, fingers well crossed and a very slow bisque firing with lots and lots of ventilation.

Everything is now made for the firing, including the setters, so now comes rock crushing and milling in preparation for the glazes.

Here is the little test kiln filled with rocks, ready for a quick heat up to around 700C to calcine them, amking them (slightly) easier to crush.
My shoulder muscles are going to get a real work out over the next few days. Everything needs to be down to grit size (aroung 3mm max) before it can go in the ball mill.

What to make?

The issue of what to make is something that I have been grappling with since starting this project. The forms need to help illustrate the qualities possible with the wide and varied type of materials that I have collected. This is complicated by the fact that many of the clay or clay type materials that I am using are extremely difficult to use in conventional ways. size and complexity of form are often limited, but it is within the limitations I have set myself that I am managing to produce a startling variety of colour, texture and surface depth.
Considering the time that needs to be spent preparing these rocks for use and the fact that I often have pretty small amounts of them, it was obvious that I was not going to be making ranges of functional pots. The problem then is what will be the underlying structure of the work. The easiest option would have been to make the forms that are usually associated with woodfiring - vessels with a strong sculptural element, such as teabowls or tsubo. These forms come accompanied by a wealth of relatively well known references, which provide an easy entry point to view and understand the pots. The references are, however, from a culture different from my own and I am extremely wary of superficial cultural appropriation.
There is no tradition of high fired ceramics in Britain (pre-industrial revolution) for me to draw on. Rather, the pots that I am making are a representation of a ceramic landscape that might have existed if history had followed a different path. The forms that I am using to express these ideas are personal to me and have developed from my experience of the materials themselves, the places that I have collected from and what it is about ceramics that inspires me. They don't, however, come with the accessible baggage of well known ceramic references that help draw the viewer in. this is essentially what I have been working with over the summer.
And now, I have a workshop full of drying work, only one clay type still to use and the rock crushing has begun.

These tests are lineblends of rocks from the Malvern area, including red Triassic sandstone, at the top - and bottom an initial lineblend of materials from the Gog Magogs, near my home.

Long time no post

It's been a strange summer. Too good perhaps, you might think, for me to do any work - just spend my days enjoying the sun in leafy beer gardens. But, between beer garden visits I have been working very hard indeed, though this has been a cycle of making, assessing, breaking, recycling and making again. The crux of this frustrating sequence is the problem I have of how best to use the materials I have collected, and how best to illustrate their qualities. Complicating the matter is the fact that I have a wide range of interesting materials that will not allow themselves to be used in the same way. The rocks need high temperatures to form beautiful glazes, but not all respond well to woodfiring. many of the clays that I have can exhibit lovely qualities but at a range of lower temperatures - temperatures that prohibit glazing.
The test firings I have done in my new small kiln have been interesting and gave me some indications of what to do with these lower temperature clays. The last high firing was also useful - many tests meeting straight with the hammer, but a few stunners and some ideas for forms. My aim is to produce a cohesive body of work that spans firing temperatures and firing types and best illustrates the idea that forms the basis what I am doing. No mean feat I can assure you - hence the seemingly endless making and breaking. Finally, though, I appear to have a workshop almost full enough of pieces to fill my larger wood kiln. Some time has gone by since the first of these was made and, despite repeated looking, they are still in one piece.
So, the plan is for a stoneware wood firing with these new forms, followed by stringent assessment and (hopefully) a series of other firings at lower temperatures and in the gas kiln. I will blog again with some images when I am feeling more confident and less superstitious.

Second time lucky

Despite no blog postings, it has been a busy summer. I made a variety of test pieces from ideas of form and glaze that I have been developing over the last few months, mostly concerned with how best to illustrate the qualities that I am getting from the rocks that I am using. After the disappointing maiden firing of the new small kiln I was reluctant to post anything until I knew the results - partly just going with the flow of concentrated effort and partly superstition.
By mid August everything was made (and often broken up and remade), the wood was good and dry....

...rocks were crushed and milled and blended. I packed the little kiln last weekend and started the firing on Wednesday morning at 7.45am.

This time I was much more gentle with the move from hearth to hobs and managed to escape the cracking that occurred last time. It is only a short kiln so the distance between the initial fire and stack is not great.
Once the fire was fully inside the temperature really wanted to shoot up so I took it very slowly over the last 100 degrees to 1000C. I took a look at the weather vane and the wind had changed direction - blowing directly into the village! Dammit! Gritting my teeth I started heavy reduction but to my amazement, as the kiln is short, the chimney had heated up well in that last soak + with the air being drawn in through the passive damper in the chimney base, there was very little smoke. It wasn't very long before flame was shooting out of the top of the chimney. No matter how hard I stoked the blowhole failed to show any flame so I blocked it off + had to rely on the flame (and view inside the chamber) to assess reduction.
The rest of the firing seemed to go well - taking 19 1/2 hours in total to reach cone 12 almost down. A nice clean clam up, no late reduction, and I left it to cool.
By Sunday morning the temp was around 60C so, heart in mouth, opened up.
It was a test firing and at laest half of the pieces that I made did not survive the firing process or the unpacking, however....I got some real stunners out.
This is one of the best - glaze from Galloway rocks

There was a fair temperature variation in the kiln, but this is something that I can exploit. The top shelf didn't get that much ash but for a 19 hour firing I managed to get some wonderful rich surfaces.

This is based on igneous rock from the Malvern Hills - the oldest rock in England.