Our firing went as well as could be expected. I’m learning more all the time. The back of the kiln was under-fired, but 80% came out OK.

I ‘borrowed’ some of my friend and neighbour Sandy Lockwood’s wood. Sandy fires with wood too and lives only a few kilometres away in the same village.

Sandy buys all her fire wood in, so her stock of wood is totally different from ours. Our on-site burnt forest that has been left standing, but dead, after the catastrophic bush fires of 2019 doesn’t burn the way it used to.

We have been nurturing our few acres of eucalypt forest for the past 46 years that we have lived and worked here.  Carefully and very selectively dragging out the dead branches and tree trunks from the bush for use in our kilns and home. Almost everything that we do runs on wood for fuel. We obviously fire the kiln with it, but we also have a slow combustion kitchen stove that cooks our meals, warms the kitchen and also heats the hot water for the house. Then there is the slow combustion heater in the lounge room that we use during the cooler months to keep us warm at night. We also have a slow combustion stove and room heater in the pottery shed.

I get a lot of sowing done repairing my worn-out clothes, sitting front of the lounge room heater during the winter. I wear the clothes out chainsawing, cutting, carting, splitting and stacking all the firewood. It’s a bit of a circular economy. 

We have so much of this dead wood now, I have to find a way to use it creatively. I have another couple of firings scheduled in before the Australian Ceramics Assn, Open studio weekends of the 12th Nov. This overlaps with the Southern Highlands Arts Trail, Open Studio weekends on the first two weekends in Nov. We’ll be open for visitors on all 4 days of those weekends.

I will use these next firings to try out different approaches to solving my dilemma with this wood. If I can’t find a way of burning it successfully in its current form. I will have to change the fire box arrangement. But I’ll try all the easier options first. Side stoking the back chamber will probably work well, but I don’t want to do too much of that until I build an afterburner and flame tube with a spark arrestor on top. I don’t have time to build that until after the open studios in a few weeks.

So the next couple of firings will concentrate on fuel management, then packing and firing technique.

Here are a few of the roasty toasty pots that I left unglazed on the outside to pick up colour, fire flashing and a little wood ash from the one day firing. I used to fire the wood kiln for between 12 to 14 hours, but now with the change in the timber, I need to fire for 17 to 19 hours. Too long for an old guy and his hard working Missus. I was completely trashed the next day.

The colour is lovely and warm and the surfaces are very tactile.

Working with this rough, iron stained stoneware clay has been such a pleasure after the past few months of battling with the ground-up-sericite-stone bodies.