Monthly Archives: September 2024

K-pot Journal

Posted on by

K-pot Journal

There is a world-wide phenomenon in international popular music that has taken the world by storm in the past decade or so called K-pop. A style of popular Korean music, loosely based on traditional Korean music styles, but greatly influenced by loads of Western music styles like hip hop, R&B, rock, jazz, even gospel, reggae, electronic dance, folk, country, disco, and classical. Every body seems to know about K-pop, this Korean cultural export.

I don’t know much about K-pop and Korean popular music, I come here to study ceramics, so I thought that I’d call this blog K-pot! On my first visit to Korea, 8 years ago, I wrote a blog called ‘The Kim-chi Chronicles’ (Sept 2016), This blog is its latest incarnation.

This is my 7th visit to Korea, since I first came here in 2016. I was here only 6 months ago for a ceramics conference, where I presented a paper on low emissions wood firing. This involves using a kiln with a downdraught firebox (Bourry box) which is capable of firing with relatively little smoke. Of course there is always some smoke when burning wood, but this style of kiln design keeps it to a minimum most of the time.

In Australia, where I have done most of my research, I use hard wood, eucalyptus trees for fuel. Eucalypt hard woods are heavy and dense. They burn slowly and steadily. Perfect conditions for low smoke emissions. Here in Korea, they have a lot of different softwoods in the form of pine trees/conifers. They burn fast and furiously, so it is a challenge to minimise smoke during firings.

People here have asked me what is the secret addition that you have incorporated into the kiln? As if there is some sort of afterburner, that they can add to their own kiln to clean it up. There is no secret addition! It is a complete kiln design incorporating the virtues of the down draught firebox that burns the wood more or less in stages, so that there is no intense emission of volatiles that causes smoke in most other kilns.

So I am here again in Bangsan, in the Yanggu Porcelain Village, this time not as an artist-in-residence, as I have been in the past, but as a kiln building tradesman, a glorified refractory bricklayer. I have been tasked with the job of building a small kiln here that demonstrates that wood burning kilns can be fired with a minimum of smoke.

This project was first floated way back in 2018, when the director of the Yanggu Porcelain Museum and Research Centre, Mr Jung Do-Sub, asked me if I would be interested in such a project. The Museum had purchased the rights to publish my book, Laid Back Wood Firing, and had it translated into Korean. They have also published my other books ‘5 Stones’, and ‘Rock Glazes, Geology and Mineral Processing for potters’.

Unfortunately, The translator took someone else’s advice and renamed the book “Smokeless Wood Firing”. Which is of course not true. all wood creates some smoke when being burnt. My project is to keep the smoke to a minimum. Calling the book ‘smokeless woodfiring’ only creates false expectations, and room for criticism and disappointment.

As a result of the books’ publication, there was some interest in getting one of my kilns built at the Yanggu Research Centre as a demonstration model. Like other places in the world, There is a growing interest in cleaning up the environment, at least from the grass roots level, not from there polluting industries, who are being dragged kicking and screaming to be made to be kept to account. It is this citizen-lead interest that is putting pressure on political leaders to make some sort of gesture to seem to be doing something, while still taking large donations from the polluters to keep the status quo.

The result is a very slow transition to clean up the environment. The results can be seen here in this tiny, remote village. When we were last here before ‘Covid’, in early 2019. The streets were being dug up and gas pipe lines being installed to every home and business. Previously, most home heating and commercial cookery was being done using pressed coal briquettes. Dirty, inefficient and polluting. The immediate result is much cleaner air.

These days the smoke from the wood fired kilns looks just as polluting, now that the residents have paid to have cleaner gas installed, to eliminate their smoke, why shouldn’t the residents want cleaner air, and less smoke pollution from every source? The traditional kilns here are very smokey, producing black smoke all the way through the firing schedule, from start to finish, particularly at the end of the firing, when the extra chambers of the climbing kilns are being fired by ‘side stoking’ methods.

There are two climbing kilns here in the centre of the village behind the research Centre and Museum. One of them right next to an ancient kiln site, where porcelain has been made since the beginnings of porcelain making here, hundreds of years ago. With an ancient tradition of pottery making here in the village, using these old kilns going back many hundreds of years, it’s hard to suddenly say NO! Just stop doing it. So the Director of the Museum, was thinking a decade in advance of this possible occurrence.

He managed to secure access to an abandoned military base, a few kilometres out of town, up a small valley, well out of the village, where a new

Smoke from one of the traditional kilns here.

‘Porcelain Village’ is being built. When I first arrived here 8 years ago, in this new development, the buildings were still very new and my room still smelt of fresh paint, and all the facilities were still being installed in what had been the officers quarters. One of the stone barracks was being converted to a meeting room and coffee shop. The Museum director had big plans to build several different styles of kilns out here to add to the research facilities available to the students. That has since then, mostly all come to pass. However, the plan keeps changing and expanding and getting more complex.
The Museum Director is a very smart guy, a good strategic thinker and politically very savvy.

The first kiln built up in the valley was a tunnel kiln. I didn’t see this kiln being built, as I have been away for 5 years because of the COVID lockdown, and then the huge catastrophic bush fires that burnt our pottery. It has taken me 5 years to recover, so that I could finally accept Mr Jung’s offer to come and build them one of my kilns.

The second kiln built here was a traditional low-firing, earthenware wood kiln, the design of which, originated in Jeju Island off the far South Coast of Korea. It is built out of basalt stones. The only available material on Jeju Island, so is limited to very low firing temperatures. A kind of tough earthenware.
Hand made fire bricks stacked to dry in front of the Jeju basalt stones kiln

The third kiln built here was a traditional 5 chambered climbing kiln, built almost entirely out of hand made blocks and bricks for the walls, and hand rolled cones of local fire clay for the dome and arches.


Hand made clay cone shaped bricks set out to dry in the kiln shed.

The 5 chamber domed climbing kiln getting ready for its first firing

There are 3 independent, self contained workshop/residencies for artists and their families, and another building with 4 bedrooms and 4 studios, suitable for single student residents. Each of the studios has it’s own electric kin and pug mill. There is a huge communal clay processing and kiln firing building with 2 large gas kilns, and finally a very large conference/residence building that can sleep up to a dozen people with large multiple bathroom, toilets, and even a sauna and laundry.

As far as I can ascertain, all the residents/students here have already completed MA hons degrees from their university, and have come here to study for up to 5 years to gain their PhD in porcelain research. It appears that they get rent free access to all the facilities here and only have to pay for their gas and electricity bills. An amazing deal. Such great support for the Arts here! In exchange, they are expected to take part in communal activities like the making of the hand made fire bricks for the last kiln built here. or making the years supply of small test tiles for glaze testing.

There are plans for the local government to develop and sell off several privately owned and developed house and pottery studio sites, next to the research facilities. There may be up to 8 or 10 of these house sites. 2 of them have now been taken up, and buildings are currently underway. It will become a small porcelain village and creative community.

My wood fired kiln is small compared to the vast climbing kilns here. But it is actually quite a large kiln of 85 cu. ft. or 2.5 cu. m. Very large for a single potter to fill regularly in Australia. However, I expect that it will be filled by group effort here, just like all the other big kilns. Mine will be the 5th wood kiln to be built on site here. A demonstration model of what might be possible in terms of reducing smoke pollution in wood firing, while still achieving reduced stoneware wood ash effects.

I only hope that it all goes to plan, However, I am mentally prepared to accept some smoke, as all the wood here is very dry pine, that will burn intensely, so I will have my work cut out to get a good clean result. I will be severely embarrassed if it all ends up going pear shaped in the firing. So far the kiln looks good and is built to the specifications that I usually rely on when designing similar wood kilns. But knows what will happen when I fire it with very dry pine fuel. I can only guess, but I imagine that there will be some smoke.

My finished kiln with 2 Bourry style downdraft fire boxes side by side.
Ready for K-pot firing. I have to wait and see what my decisions were like.

Not digital Native, but Dig it all native

Posted on by

Dig it all native

I have always been interested in living gently. All my ceramic work incorporates this philosophy, this respect for the environment. My lifestyle choices include growing my own food, generating my own solar power, collecting my own drinking water, building my own hand-made house from local materials, and growing my own fuel for my kiln. So when it comes to making my work. I choose to make it from locally available materials that I can find around me, in my immediate locality, wherever this is possible. This grounds me in my environment. It also severely limits what I can make, however, this is not a problem, it is an intriguing challenge that engages me on many levels physically, mentally and spiritually.
I dig my native ceramic materials locally, within a 50 km radius of where I live. This has enabled me to develop my own unique quality of wood fired porcelain, proto-porcelains and blackware made from these special native stones. The Essential nature of this enterprise is about a respectful interaction with my environment, in this locality.
When I was young I wanted to believe that there were some absolutes in life. I wanted to believe that there could be a definition of such concepts as truth and beauty. I’ve come to realise that there will not be any absolutes in my life other than old age, incontinence and death, possibly taxes. I have had to come to terms with the fact that good and evil, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness are all relative and coexist in each of us, all of the time. I accept this duality and embrace the angst that comes with the rejection of false certainties.
 

We have lost our bush land, we are loosing our native animals. The corner shop has gone. We are forced to drive in a car to a distant, edge of town, shopping mall to get to a bank and supermarket. Our neighbours houses have locked gates and shuttered windows. In short we are loosing our society. Everything has changed in my lifetime, and I don’t see it as better. I go to great lengths to avoid supporting the shopping mall. I search out the remaining family owned small businesses, the butcher, baker, fish monger and the greengrocer, to do my trade We have worked to become largely self-reliant with most of our food from our garden and orchards, but we still need to buy some protein.
 

We are no longer a nation of makers, we are all being corralled into becoming a nation of consumers. I reject this coercion. I will not buy vinyl coated chip-board and plastic, throw-away rubbish from Ikea or the hyper-mall. This apparent convenience is ruining the world. I want real things in my life, things that are beautiful as well as useful and that will last a lifetime if needed. I enjoy engaging with the patina of age and the mundane chips and tears of a life well lived on objects that I have come to love and respect.

Being brought up in a loosely Buddhist/Quaker household, I was probably the only 7 year old in my primary school who knew the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, or even who he was. Not that I thought that this was in any way important at the time, but looking back now it seems a bit weird? Given this starting point, it should be no surprise that my first pot in 1959 was an interpretation of a Tibetan butter lamp. It’s amazing what kids pick up from parents conversations. Not that I knew much about Tibetan butter lamps, but it is quite interesting to me on reflection, that this is what I chose to make, sitting in the gutter of the dirt road in front of where we lived and picking out fresh wet clay from the gutter after a rain storm. I suppose that it supports Loloya’s assertion that the man is made in the child before his seventh year.
My mother kept that pot all her life and after her death, I discovered it amongst her personal treasures, tucked safely away, wrapped in cotton wool, in a box in her wardrobe. So it came back to me and I still have it. At that time, in this family setting, it was not the pot that was important, but the activity of its making and the effect that the pot and its creation would have on the maker and the people who used it, which was up for discussion and appreciation. Around this time it became clear to me that the best things in life were not things at all.
 

Rachel Carson was a hot topic in 1962. I was 10 and old enough to be expected to help shovel manure into the ‘turned’ compost heap for the large, extended-family vegetable plot that fed us all. In 1972 I had decided that I wanted to be a professional potter and was at Art School, starting to wonder where I would be living and how I could achieve a passive, independent existence as an artist. The Vietnam War was in full swing. I registered as a Conscientious Objector and the ‘The Club Of Rome’ released ‘Limits to Growth’.
I decided that I could only hope to achieve financial, artistic and food security if I chose to live out in the country where land was cheaper and the air and water cleaner. These events and others like them ground my cultural lens and set its focal length. So now when I think about firing my kiln, I first think how important it is to fire as cleanly as possible, as I would be the first one to be concerned, if my neighbour were to create a lot of unnecessary smoke and pollution in his day to day life. I don’t see that being involved in a creative activity gives us some sort of carte blanche or ‘get out of jail free card’ to pollute.
 

I also think about how I can use as little wood as possible while still being able to see that my pot is obviously wood fired. I don’t buy my wood from a merchant. I grow it, cut it and split it myself. I have a finite amount of energy, everything that happens here is facilitated by human effort. However, I do use a few machines these days to help me do the heavy work as I get older. I have replaced my original old, hand cross-cut saw with a chain saw. The block buster with a hydraulic splitter. The water bucket with a pump. Hand and foot mixing my clay with a pug mill. I am not a luddite, but I am aware that everything has an environmental cost. However, as I age I need to reduce the physical strain on my body if I’m to continue to keep working and creating beautiful objects into the future.
 

I have an image of what I want to create. I chase it. It is beautiful, but elusive. I can never achieve what is in my minds eye, but I keep prosecuting the illusion that it is possible. I like the intimacy of the bowl form. It is small, round and engaging when cupped in the hands. I love them as objects, the symbolism of sharing, the embedded meaning of the food container, nourishment and sustenance. I love the rich history of the peasant rice bowl and the Japanese tea bowl. They are omnipresent at every level of my life. I eat and drink from my bowls every day

This image that I have of a beautiful bowl worthy of contemplation has a gentle wood fired and flashed surface. A surface that I have worked at developing over the past forty five years of my creative practice, where my selected local timbers, when burnt in my hand made kiln, leave their delicate ash patterns on the surface of my locally sourced, water-ground native porcelain stone clay bodies. This subtle wood fired ash glazing of the ceramic surfaces at high temperatures develops a wide range of colours, textures and patinas that are not usually seen on porcelain.

I think a lot about my firing process and the best way to get the soft, delicate and engaging surfaces that are tactile and suited to being hand held and smoothly functional as well as endeavoring to exploit Asian aesthetic concepts of irregularity. This porcelain is not from the moulds of Sèvres or Meissen. This work has a proud Southern Hemisphere heritage.
 

I also think about the effect that my firing will have on others, my neighbours and finally myself and my family. Will these small bowls that I am making have any genuine useful place in society? Will the viewer appreciate the philosophical meaning embedded in their making? I certainly hope so, but nothing is certain.

It has been said that the most rare and expensive commodity today is time. My methods are fully hands-on, antiquated, quaint and oh, so very slow, so my output is quite small. These objects are time solidified and made manifest. Beautiful, unique things like these take time to be brought to life, and more time to be given a useful life in daily use, so that they develop their mundane scars and patina of use. They grow and develop with time, just as they require time to be fully appreciated by use and enquiry.

The unexamined bowl, is a bowl not worth living with.
You can buy those bowls at Ikea.

Fire and Ash – Sept 2024

Posted on by

Lowe and Lee Gallery

Fire and Ash – Sept 2024

Steve Harrison Opening Statement – Towards a Greener Wood Firing Practice.

I have been wood firing for over 50 years now. Gosh, how time flys.
I never thought that I’d live this long, never mind still be wood firing at this age.
But Peter Rushforth was still wood firing right up until a few years before his death in his 90’s.

I became interested in firing my pots with wood while I was in art school at the old ESTC in 1971.
There was no wood fired kiln at East Sydney back then. In fact there were no student built kilns there at all.
However, I changed all that when I started teaching there in 1974. I built half a dozen wood fired kilns. In fact ESTC, got a reputation as the place to go if you wanted to learn about wood firing, at that time. This reputation was further enhanced when Bill Samuels joined the staff a few years later and built a tunnel kiln.

Returning to 1971, I realised while I was still a student that if I wanted to fire with wood, it would have to be in a self made kiln, built in my parents back yard. I had very tolerant and supportive parents!
I was drawn to the quiet, natural qualities of wood firing. No one was wood firing back then in 1970, but I was influenced by my reading of books on Japanese tea wares. The pieces that I was drawn to were all wood fired, from Iga and Shigaraki, through Shino wares to Bizen pieces. All my teachers, Peter Rushforth, Col Levy and Derek Smith were firing with oil fired kilns. Bernie Sahm was firing with coke and later LP gas. Shiga Shigao, with whom I did my apprenticeship a few years later, was also firing with LP gas.
So to fire with wood, for me, meant going it alone. Luckily, I had my partner Janine king who was also keen to fire with wood.

The only pottery book on the market at the time was Bernard Leach’s ‘A Potters Book’, everyone had a copy. It was required reading. In there Leach states that he built his first wood fired kiln in Japan as a student. It was a complete failure. He failed to get to temperature and also managed to burn down the kiln shed and studio in the process! He tells how wood firing is dirty, smoky, very difficult and exhausting. Possibly so, but Leach was an English Gentleman, not used to any hard physical work. He and Hamada, later built a 3 chamber climbing kiln, when he returned to England to set up the Leach Pottery in St Ives, but soon converted it to oil firing. Wood firing was just too demanding and difficult.

Leach states: “The reluctance of many kilns to rise above 1200oC to 1300oC has been to many another potter besides myself a cause for anxiety and even desperation. The firing is the climax of the potter’s labour, and in a wood fired kiln of any size it is a long and exhausting process. Weeks and months of work are at stake. Any one of a dozen things may go wrong. Wood may be damp, flues may get choked, bungs of saggars fall, shelves give way and alter draughts, packing may have been too greedily close, or for sheer exhaustion one may have snatched an hours sleep, handing over control to someone else and things begin to move, to warp and to bend, the roar of combustion takes on a deeper note—the heavy domes crack and tongues of white flame dart out here and there, the four minute stokes fill the kiln shed with bursts of dense black smoke and fire. Even in the east, where hand work is usual and labour specialised, a big kiln firing has the aspect of a battle field where men test themselves to the utmost against the odds. This may sound like discouragement, but it is the simple truth”.


Having read all this, it seems that all of the Australian potters followed suit.

The only wood fired kiln in Sydney when I was a student was at the University of NSW, in the Industrial Arts Dept. It was fired just a few times a year. Ivan McMeekin forbade any outside visitors to firings. Possibly on OH&S grounds. But especially students from the National Arts School, who he looked down on as being a bit radical and not properly trained. However, I used to turn up for the night shift after 5 pm when he had gone home, and made friends with some of the students. Ron Balderston and Geoff Crispin. I still see Ron, we became friends. I learnt a lot there. I sat quietly, was respectful and did a large share of the wood carting and stacking to earn my keep.

What I learnt at the uni of NSW, was that wood firing can be a quiet, easy, relaxed, efficient and a clean way to fire pots. It can be a beautiful experience! If you prepare yourself well, with all your wood cut, split and stacked next to the kiln, and if the kiln is built in a well planned, decent space with room around it and well ventilated. It is a remarkably satisfying experience. Whether this is how it is for you is entirely up to you to get your preparations in order. We have come a long way since Leach in the 1940’s.

I believe that it is widely understood by those who know me, that I am a Greenie! I am always looking for better, cleaner, more environmentally friendly ways to fire my kilns.

It is generally understood here how wood firing can be carbon neutral. The carbon in the wood fuel comes from the air and is returned to the air when burnt. If the tree is not burnt, but left to rot in the forest, all the carbon is still return to the environment, but on a longer time frame.
However, cutting forest to burn as fuel can be an environmental disaster. Just think of Queenstown in Tasmania!

It all depends on how you go about obtaining you wood fuel, and how you choose to burn it. Janine and I are lucky enough to own our own forest, that we have nurtured and lightly harvested for its dead wood for almost 50 years. 48 to be precise.

But being carbon neutral is not what occupies my attention these days. There is the problem of particulate emissions from our chimneys, This is going to be a big issue into the future, not just smoke from chimneys, but the very fine PM2.5 particles. I understand that Canberra has now banned wood burning stoves within the city boundaries because of the health issues. Potters who claiming that “I only reduce at night”, or “I Live out in the country side” doesn’t remove the problem. It isn’t a responsible or thoughtful answer.

Over the last couple of years, I have been experimenting with an afterburner/spark arrestor/scrubber on top of my chimney. This is my attempt to reduce my particulates. It’s a work in progress at this stage, but I believe that I’m making some progress.


Stainless steel ‘Scrubber’ installed on top of the chimney.

We all have to do our bit to keep the environment as clean as possible while still living a creative life. I chose to fire my kilns very quickly to minimise the destructive environmental effects of my work. Janine’s little wood fired kiln fires in just 5 hours, my larger brick kiln is fired for about 15 hours. But I use a down draught fire box (Bourry Box). This makes for a relatively clean firing. It doesn’t put a lot of ash on the pots, but it ‘flashes’ the glaze surfaces, and enhances the look and feel of the pots. I really appreciate these minimal ash effects on my glazes. Just look at the work of Gwen Hanssen Pigott. Beautiful, elegant, lightly flashed wood fired surfaces.

I really love the delicate ash deposit that I get on the surface of my celadon glazes. it enhances them. It doesn’t detract in any way.
Of course, right at the front of the setting where the ash and embers meet the first rows of pots. A lot can happen there. This is a place I call the ‘Zone of Death’, because a lot of pots are sometimes reduced to shards there, but ever so beautiful shards they are! These pieces can be just as interesting and dramatic as any pot from a 5 day firing, but without the emissions. See my piece titled ‘Damaged Goods’, as an example of this kind of fired surface.


Unglazed porcelain bowl with minor kintsugi repair.

Gathered here tonight are a representative sample of all of the different approaches to wood firing. It’s a very rich and varied field of artistic endeavour, and it’s so good to see so much great work all in one place.
Long may we continue to stoke the fires of our creative desires.

Spring is Here.

Posted on by

Here we are in the first week of spring and the hot weather was very welcome, but unseasonably hot for this time of year. Just more evidence of global heating and what’s in store for us in the future?

I have given the peaches, nectarines and almonds a 2nd spray of copper Bordeaux mix to try and minimise leaf curl and shot hole fungus spores. It needs to be done once a month during the growing season. Actually, the recommendation is for every 10 days, but who has the time? And too much copper spray drift can build up in the soil and become toxic over long periods of time. So I just do the minimum.

I don’t think that I can ever eliminate it here, just keep it under control to minimise the damage. The trees don’t seem to suffer from it too much later in the season. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the cold damp nights in early spring?

Because of the warm weather. I planted out tomatoes, zucchinis and cucumber seedlings. Plus peas, beans, sweet basil, lettuce and radish seeds. Then last night we had a cracking frost. The Weather Bureau only forecast 2 degrees for Bowral, our nearest town with a weather station, and we are usually one or two degrees warmer than that. But not so last night.  However, I checked the seedlings and they are all OK in the protective cocoon of the plastic bird netting frames that cover both the orchard and vegetable garden. Lucky!

The Flanders poppies have now started to open and will be with us for the next few months. They need disturbed soil to germinate, so do best in the vegetable garden, because the soil is regularly turned over while weeding and planting. I established them in the new orchard and they did well for the first year, but as I haven’t cultivated in there since, only mown, all their seeds are lying dormant in the soil, with no new plants germinating in there.

The Cherry trees are in full bloom now as is the avocado tree. Every thing is responding to the warmth. There is so much optimism in the air now. Life is returning to all the formally dormant plants. I took a picture of the lawn behind the house. I use the term ‘lawn’ very loosely. It is actually a stretch of self sown wild grasses and weeds that we keep mown. This stretch of mown weeds has just erupted on a blue haze of tiny flowers in huge swathes. The flowers are microscopic, but there are millions of them. I tired to photograph it, but the effect on the light out there just doesn’t show up a clearly in the image. Janine tells me that it is called ’Speedwell’, but our neighbour, John Meredith used to call it ’The blue pimpernel’. What ever it is, it’s very pretty on mass.

We have just completed the last of 5 in a row, weekend workshops. Quite a busy time for us. It’s nice to have a bit of ’spare’ time now, so I’m back in the garden, just in time for spring. The asparagus is just starting to pop up, just a few at a time, here and there. The real season is still a couple of weeks off as yet, but I’m picking the biggest ones to have with our breakfast eggs.

Now that I have just a smidgen of spare time, I have mended the old wheel barrow. We bought this wheel barrow in 1976 or ’77? More or less the first year that we arrived here. We had worn out two 2nd hand ones previously. Purchasing this one was a real statement of ‘We have arrived, and we intend to cultivate this derelict place’. The bottom got rather scratched over the years and had started to rust out, becoming wafer thin and flimsy. I hate to see waste, so I stepped in and made a new base plate for the tray and fitted new bearings into the wheel hub. It’s all good for another couple of years till the next part wears out. 

Repair, re-use, re-purpose.