We have been sweltering here in 40 oC heat for a couple of weeks now. We were very fortunate to be blessed with 3 days of rain in the middle. It saved a lot of our plants from just shrivelling up. Fortunately, we don’t have any bush fires near here this time. However, I did start up the fire fighting water pump and sprayed water through the sprinkler system that I have installed on all the building here, in this case, on the pottery tin roof. I used it on the worst couple of days, to cool it down a little. It is good to run the pump every now and again to keep it in good working condition and cycle the fuel through the carburettor to make sure that it doesn’t ‘gum’ up.

I’ve been making use of the hot weather to crush and grind my collected porcelain stones. They have to be put through the big jaw crusher first, then the small crusher, then sieved to remove any over sized pieces and these are put back through the crusher again. Once it’s all of a suitable size, it goes into the ball mill to be ground down to a very fine paste.

Once it’s out of the mill. I let it settle and flocculate for a few days and then remove any excess water from the top and it goes into a plaster basin to dry out until it is firm – sort of plastic. Except that it never really gets to be fully plastic. This is because it is just ground up rock dust and not clay. It does have a very small percentage of clay in the stone due to weathering of the minerals, but it is not a lot. It really takes years for this stuff to become workable in any normal sense of the word as potters might understand it.

If I were making bulk clay for stock, I’d be using the big ball mill and pour out the slip onto the drying bed on filter cloth. Once firm, I’d lay it down for several years in a cool dark place, but I don’t have that luxury on this occasion. I have posted these stones back from overseas on my recent trip. there are only just a few kilos of each sample, so the batches are quite small. Just enough to make a few pots out of each. I’d like to have more mineral to work with, but it costs about $100 to post a few kilos of stones back from places like Cornwall, Korea, China and Japan. So I have to work within my budget, as many countries have abandoned sea mail postage and the only option is now air mail. On one occasion, I was offered a cheaper option of ‘slow’ air mail. It made me wonder how the plane stayed up in the air if it was flying slowly?

As these bodies are not aged, they respond to being worked something like ‘halva’! it just snaps if you bend it. It has to be coaxed along very slowly and gently, sort of seduced into changing shape.  I can’t even cut it in any normal way with a wire, it just tears! I can’t throw anything large out of this stuff, but I don’t need to. I only need a few excellent fired examples of the stuff to include in my exhibition at Watters Gallery in August, called ‘5 Stones’. This will be an exhibition of single-porcelain from all around the world, from the five places where single-stone porcelain was independently discovered and developed.