Something boro, Something blue

Posted on 07/12/2016 by hotnsticky

I have started to get stuck into the pile of shirts and jeans that need repairing. I have managed to wear out several pieces of clothing in recent weeks, all work wear items, worn through in the regions of highest wear.

The most critical was my welding shirt, which has worn very well for many years, possibly 5 or 6 years. It had become a bit threadbare and almost transparent at the front. To the point that I got a radiation burn on my tummy after spending a day welding up all the seams on the recent kiln. I didn’t realise at the time of it happening, that I’d torn a hole through it. I had a ‘T’ shirt on as well but it wasn’t enought, as you don’t feel radiation, but in the evening, when I showered, I got a nasty shock.

So my first job is to add some dense dark fabric to the front of my shirt. I also have a few pairs of jeans that have worn through in the front thighs and knees, but also suspiciously in the crotch? I’m guessing that this is from sitting on the Leach-style potters kick wheel wooden saddle? I’m hoping so, as I can’t think of any other reason.

These are some sort of stretchy jean fabric, so I steal the off-cuts from the bottom of the legs of Janine’s new turquoise stretch jeans, that she had to shorten, so as to get the same weight and stretch of the materials matched. The colours work OK too. Perhaps not in public? I’d feel a bit like one of those Japanese monkeys!

I have quite a collection of used, 2nd hand, Japanese indigo fabrics. I buy these off-cuts and old recycled pieces of clothing whenever I go to Japan. They are still plentiful and reasonably cheap in the markets. I really like them. indigo dyed fabric is so long-lasting because of the preserving effect of the indigo. I also just happen to love the colour. There was a time, when I was younger, when I couldn’t feel really comfortable in the colour blue, I preferred orange, then my favourite colour morphed into yellow, eventually into green, and finally I’m OK with blue and mauve, or even a bit of purple. I guess that this leads me to thinking that I’ll end up wearing red. Perhaps I’ll go full circle and wear yellow again? Or will I finally end up liking white? I doubt that. I lead a very busy life. I just can’t wear white. It gets dirty so quickly.

What ever the reason, I’m very happy to wear Japanese indigo fabric as patches on my clothes. The Japanese even have a specific word for this, and it’s called ‘boro’. The repair or mending of worn clothing with patches to prolong their life. It was always seen as something shameful in the past, when it was a sign of poverty, but these days, I’m starting to see Japanese patchwork clothing everywhere. It’s finally trendy. I don’t do it because it’s trendy. I’ve been patching my clothes ever since I learnt to sew. My mother taught me to sew on my own buttons, take up my the legs of my new jeans and hem them. So it wasn’t such a big step to add a patch or two as needed.

Next, I work on my worn out shorts that need a new front to one leg.

then the jeans.

An earlier pair from the time when I was transitioning out of orange through yellow into green.

This activity fits in well with my philosophy of self-reliance and not throwing anything out until it is really worn out. For me this is not any statement of fashion, as fashion is just not on my radar at all. It’s a political statement. Not consuming stuff that you don’t really need and making things last, it’s cutting against all the advertising and market pressures. Over consuming is polluting the world with toxic landfill and adding to global warming. So much of what we are encouraged to buy is just not necessary. So I’ve decided to minimise my spending and as a result, I’ve found that I have more money left over for the things that I really want and need, when I really need them.

I spend my evenings these days sitting comfortably and listening to music or listening to the idiot box with half an eye to the screen, while I pin-up and stitch my patches. Some of these clothes that I’m working on go back 15 years and they are still going, and I believe becoming more interesting as they display their work life and history. I’m applying new patches over worn-out older ones. The layers just keep building. It’s an interesting topography of work, wear and repair. A 3D sculpture or installation that gently illustrates environmental activism as some sort of artwork.

I’m pretty sure that it’s not art, It’s not quite ‘boro’, it’s possibly interesting, maybe it’s beautiful? Maybe not?. Otherwise it’s certainly ‘creative’ and a nice piece of re-cycling, re-purposing and life-cycle extending handiwork. After-all, it’s just work-wear.

If nothing else, it’s a very rewarding evenings entertainment.

Best wishes

Steve

The First Week of Summer

Posted on 04/12/2016 by hotnsticky

The season cycles past us and spring has gone in a very busy flash of research, firings, workshops, more firings, exhibitions and kiln building. The garden took a back seat and now it’s time for catch-up. We managed to get some time in there, just enough to keep everything watered and growing. In the last week of spring I finally got the time to get in there and do a thorough weeding and cleaning out. We picked the last of the winter veggies, like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

I managed to preserve the cauliflowers into Mustard pickles.

Take one large cauliflower. It doesn’t matter if it is a bit past its best and starting to ‘burst’. You only need the small florets, add a red and green capsicum and a cucumber, plus a couple of brown onions, all diced pop fine into small bite sized chunky pieces. Soak them in brine overnight of 1/2 cup of iodised salt in 2 litres of water.

The next day, bring this to a simmer and drain off the brine. Rinse and drain again.

Depending on how much you have to do, heat up approximately a litre of vinegar ,add two cups of sugar, +1 Tb spoon of mustard powder, + 1/2 Tb spoon of curry powder and another of turmeric. Mix it all together well and bring it up to the boil. Once it’s heated, add in 1/2 a cup of flour and stir well until it thickens. Add in the drained vegetable pieces and bring back to the simmer fora minute or two.

Spoon into heated glass jars from the oven and seal with ‘pop’ top lids.

Janine makes cauliflower soup with hers as well as a batch of broccoli soup, some of which she froze. The cabbage went into our own idiosyncratic version of Australian okonomiyaki and the beetroots got pickled and preserved in spiced vinegar.

Although we have planted out all the summer veggies seeds and some seedlings now, it is still too soon to get much return. The tomatoes are flowering and the earliest plants have set some small fruit. I was a bit late getting them in, so I can’t see us getting any ripe fruit before Xmas. However, now the hot weather is here, along with the regular Monday afternoon thunderstorm and its hail, we will just have to wait and see what fruit we can get. I hope that there isn’t another hailstorm tomorrow. We’ve had enough hail for the time being.

No Rest in Paradise

Posted on 22/11/2016 by hotnsticky

The hot weather is here now and we are out in the garden early to get the jobs done before the heat sets in. We’ve had some 30 oC+ days recently. we pick cherries and the early peaches, and lucky that we did as a thunderstorm comes through in the afternoon. All dry thunder at first but then it breaks, and boy does it break. We are pelted with hail stones that pile up on the lawn and against fences and wall. the rain floods in over the verandah. We are safe inside the house, but there are some new leaks in our old 123 year old roof. I’ll have to get up there again tomorrow and see what I can do, but not now.

can see the leaves being shredded from the trees in the garden. I can only imagine what is happening to the tomatoes and other soft vegetables in the garden. The chooks will be OK. They will be hiding in their house, very scarred I’m sure, but physically OK. It’s a good thing that we harvested the two boxes of early peaches this morning!

In the evening we sit and peel peaches for preserving, shelling dried peas and milling dried broad beans down into broad bean flour to make falafel. I also grind down some of last years sun-dried corn niblets into polenta flour. There is always something to do. I might even find some time to watch the idiot box if there were anything on, but there isn’t. So I don’t. The pressure is off on this new big kiln, as the work is well under way and back on schedule, as I have a new welder.

We have delivered all our work for the Xmas shows in the Sydney Galleries as our open studio weekends are over. The tea pot sets are taped up and ready for packing up for delivery. We exhibit our joint domestic wares as King and Co. This is to separate this work from my tea bowls that I show in my own name at Watters Gallery. The opening at Watters went well and I seem to have sold 4 out of the 8 ‘kintsugi’ gold repaired bowls that I took in for the show.

I have found time again to practice my Cello. Its been locked in its case for some time now. We also find some time each morning to work over the garden beds before it gets too hot. We get them planted out with new seeds for the summer. This should have been done a month or two ago, but we have only now just found the time. I haven’t had any spare time since I got busy in August, followed by my research trip to Korea and so on.

We have harvested the garlic and onions to make room in some of the garden beds. The garlic is a bit disappointing this year, but the onions are fantastic. They have all done well, red, white and brown.

They all need to be spread out and dried, before plaiting and hanging.

I stole this little piece of text below from one of Janine’s emails to one of our friends. Speaking of our chooks and the garden. I think that it sums up our time here just now.

Our ‘spice girls’ who we realise only come to us because there might be food for them. Otherwise they scour our block and so do we (looking for them) so cunning Mr Fox doesn’t have them for dinner.
Thankfully the days are a little cooler, for a little while. Summer is no longer my favourite season. But cherries and peaches are sweet, ripe and we eat our way through the ones we save from the birds – with all manner of nets, wires pegs and stalking.
There is no rest in paradise!

It’s time to have some more different sorts of fun. Roll on summer!

Death in Furnace

Posted on 22/11/2016 by hotnsticky

All Good Things Come to an End.

I’ve been busy in the kiln factory during the week in-between our open studio weekends and then every day since. I have a big electric kiln ordered and although I have done a lot of prep on it, I was away in Korea for a while and then doing several weekend woodfiring workshops as soon as I got back, so now I have to start welding all the accumulated parts together.

I take a bit of pride in making all the parts here on site. I make all my own small fittings including door locks, handles and hinges, all made out of basic metal stock sections. Some of these parts need to be turned down on the lathe and machined to a pressed fit. This is an electric kiln, so it is all made out of aluminium, marine aluminium. This is because marine aluminium offers the best resistance to corrosion. Just the sort of chemical attack that electric kilns get from the fumes released during firing. I’ve been developing these designs for forty years, slowly improving them as I learn more from my experiences.

Aluminium is best welded using a technique called TIG. TIG welding is a type of welding that is ideally suited to welding aluminium. In fact, you can weld almost any metal with a TIG welder. ‘TIG’ stands for Tungsten Inert Gas. It uses a very high temperature tungsten electrode to pass the current into the metal. This electrode is not consumed in the process, as it is in all other types of welding. This is different. The electrode is very thin and pointed, so that the electrical current can be focussed onto a very small specific area of the job at hand. This part of the job gets very hot and starts to melt. A thin filler rod is then pushed into the weld pool of molten metal with the other hand, a droplet of molten metal melts off the end of the filler rod and merges into the surface, filling the crevice between the two pieces of metal that are to be joined. This is repeated over and over to build up a small mound in that exact spot. The electrode is them moved a very small distance, a few millimetres, and the sequence is repeated. The finished weld looks like a series of droplets, all overlapping and lined up all in a row. It’s a very beautiful, but slow and precise way to weld. Aluminium is notoriously hard to weld with any other method.

TIG maybe slow, but the welds a really nice. I wouldn’t win any prizes for my welding. I don’t do enough of it to get really good at it. After-all, I am a potter. But I make sure to weld both sides of the joint to make sure that I have 100% perfect penetration. So far, I’ve never had a crack in any of my welds in the past 30 years.

The thing that I find amazing about metal work is that all the left-over off-cuts can be re-welded back together to make new long lengths of material and these are stronger than the original section. It really appeals to my sense of purpose in living a frugal life, as well a supporting my philosophy of re-cycling and throwing nothing away until it really is worn out or useless.

If you cut a piece of wood by mistake, that is too short, then you have two short pieces of wood that don’t fit any where. You have to wait for an opportunity to use them somewhere else as two short pieces. However with metal, you just weld them back together – and they are longer and stronger!

I also find the act of joining very symbolic and reassuring. In an age of dislocation and separation, revolt and conflict, civil war and displacement. This act of imagining things in a different way, choosing the path of joining and strengthening, reusing and conserving, creating things out of what other people might consider waste. These are immensely important and powerful acts. To see this potential, then to act on it. It builds instead of destroying, it re-purposes instead of just endlessly consuming. It creates instead of wasting. This is the world that I want to live in, so I’m building my own world, in my own way. One weld at a time. One pot at a time. One garden bed at a time. One thought at a time.

Aluminium is a little bit tricky to weld. It’s slow work, as aluminium moves a lot with heat. You have to pre-heat it and be carefull to stop it warping out of shape. I put a bit of effort into it, to get good penetration, yet not too hot, so as to prevent warping. Working with aluminium involves a lot of setting-up, clamping and tacking, then some time-out, to allow the frame to cool down again before laying down more welds.

The cooling time allows me a short time in the garden for some quick weeding or watering. On the way back to the kiln shed, I feed any snails that I have collected to the chooks. They are omnivores and eat snails as well as green grass. The first thing that they do in the morning when I open the hen house door, is to rush out and start to eat green leaves of grass. But when one of them finds a snail hidden, in down next to a stone, or fence post. It’s off and running with the bounty. They all fight over it until one of them wins the prize it’s a highlight of their day.

Meanwhile, back in the kiln shed, I discover to my horror that during the process of welding this kiln, my beautiful old welding power source is starting to loose its brains. Bit by bit, some of its capacities start to disappear. It looses its ‘down-slope’ and ‘crater-fill’ functions first. I’m not mentally prepared to loose this old friend so suddenly. We’ve been working together for the past 20 years and I’m very fond of it. I know its character and how it likes to do things the best. To get the best result.

It was the absolute in cutting edge technology in its day, all solid state, power-tranistor based, AC/DC, inverter, pulse, TIG. I know that this last sentence will sound like a foreign language to most people – and it is. It’s techno-speak for welders. Just think of it as a description where every added word and each comma, costs an extra thousand dollars! This machine cost me as much as my car did back then. Effing expensive. But the car is long gone. I still have the welding plant.

As it slowly looses its functions, hour by hour, I’m left in the afternoon with something that isn’t what it used to be. It only just functions at a very basic level. Solid state alzheimers. I’m reminded of 2001, A Space Odesy, when Dave slowly unscrews HAL’s circuit boards, until it can only sing ‘Daisy, Daisy’.

My welder is reduced to this incontinent, dribbling, unrecognisable state of simplicity by the afternoon. So this is how old welders end up! I can only think of this being me in a few more years. I nurse it along as best I can. There is nothing in the instruction book of welders, or life, to help me out here. Just patience and gentle care, and I do care! I do what I can, but there isn’t really anything to be done. I take it easy on the poor old thing, resting it between welds, but the end comes.

Finally the light goes out.

I am very sad to see it go. No more Join of Arc! Twenty years on, the new models do not create any better welds than this machine. They just come with a few extra bells and solid-state whistles. Thankfully these new ones are now only a fraction of the cost.

The new machines aren’t the same. They’re small, fast and noisy.

We’ll have to spend a bit of time together to work things out and get used to each other.

Best wishes
Steve

The Art of Embracing Damage

Posted on 16/11/2016 by hotnsticky

We live in an age of instant access to information and news, except that it’s all mostly bad. I’ve stopped watching the news. It’s all too depressing. I don’t want to be ‘connected’ to this. I want my interactions to be quiet, peaceful and positive. I want to choose a constructive, creative, engagement with my environment and the people around me.

I have spent my life developing a philosophy of minimal consumption and self-reliance. I believe in not buying anything that I don’t need and not throwing anything away that isn’t fully worn out. This has been part of an exploration of how it might be possible to live frugally and gently in a faster, noisier and bigger world of seemingly senseless and excessive consumerism.

My Partner Janine King and I work in isolation, making only what pleases us. This is not good business practice, but we don’t think of ourselves as being in business. We are trying to live an independent creative life, that is sensitive to our surroundings, gentle on the earth, low-carbon and low-impact on others around us. We are attempting to live this life of small monetary rewards, but high satisfaction and so far it seems to be working out OK for us.

I work with the raw materials that I can find around me in my immediate locality and then research and test them, to attempt to discover what interesting qualities they exhibit and then try to make original ‘location-specific’ works from them. I find this approach most fascinating and very rewarding. I have discovered a single-stone native porcelain, and developed a body from it that is very beautiful, especially when wood fired. I have also found and developed a single-stone, washed basalt gravel, blackware body that is gorgeous. These two special materials are the result of a lifetimes research. Not much to show for a life, but I continue to create these Senseless Acts of Beauty, because it pleases me. I am under no illusions. I know that I could not have lived this quality of life without Janine as my partner to help me achieve it, but most importantly, we have been very lucky to have lived this simple, artistic life in Australia, where there has been no civil unrest.

It has been my intension during my career to make simple, elegant, and hopefully beautiful bowls. These bowls have been significantly influenced by Japanese and Chinese aesthetics as well as the Japanese culture of tea and Zen Buddhism I’m not a Buddhist. But some of the thinking around Zen practice has influenced my quest to live a simple, non-consumerist, low-carbon life. When I was studying the origins of single-stone porcelain in Japan recently. I did a course in Kintsugi. The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and pure gold. I have started to repair some of my more interesting failures using this technique.

Kintsugi embodies three Buddhist concepts and makes them tangible. The first is ‘wabi-sabi’. Realising that something that is flawed and imperfect can still be extraordinarily beautiful The second is ‘mushin’, the concept of non-attachment and acceptance of change. Nothing is perfect, nothing lasts and nothing is ever finished. The last is ‘mono no aware’, a certain wistfulness at the impermanence of things. We are only here for such a short time together. Our transience is a reality of our life. Embrace the moment as it is.

I feel that when I repair a beautiful pot that is broken, damaged or otherwise ‘non-perfect’ in a Western, conservative sense, I make it all the more beautiful. Spending time recovering and enhancing something that is otherwise lost, is a sign of great respect for that object. It fits well with my philosophy of minimal-consumption, self-reliance and making things last as long as possible.

Because kintsugi has been called the art of embracing damage, it occurred to me that these, recovered bowls might be a suitable and beautiful metaphor for recovery from conflict. Hence my offering them for inclusion in this up-coming end-of-year show at Watters Gallery called ‘war’.

I have very few ambitions in life. When I was young I decided that I would live in the country and to grow my own food, to make a creative life of some sort, build my own house, and live a self-reliant life. I have more-or-less fulfilled all of these modest ambitions. My lasting ambition is to make things that are meaningful, simple and modest. I go about this work of creating random acts of beauty without any regard to the effect that it may have on others. I am selfish, but not thoughtless.

Our indigenous peoples have a long tradition of respectful collecting, gathering and hunting. I feel that my small experiments interacting with the natural world, collecting stones to grind up to make my pots are compatible as a contemporary continuation/interpretation of this ancient practice. It respects place and biota. It’s 40 years since I moved to this small Village in the Southern Highlands south of Sydney. I’m pretty self-contained here. I don’t want for a lot, so I have everything that I need and I am grateful for that.

My bowls are small, simple gestures. They appear to be empty, but are in fact full of good wishes and calm, thoughtful intent.

The exhibition ‘War’ at Watters Gallery opens on Wednesday 23rd of November.

Open Studio Sale

Posted on 10/11/2016 by hotnsticky

I’m up at the crack of dawn. I told myself to wake up at the first sign of light at the window last night . I realise that I’m awake and look to the window and there is the light starting to show through the edges of the curtain. I’m up and showered, dressed and out in the car just on 6 am. I want to get all the pottery open-day signs up at the village and along the road. I start on the main road, just opposite the level crossing into the village. I’m not attempting to snag any unsuspecting passing weekend travellers out here in the middle of no-where. People who are on a mission to somewhere else. No! That takes more signs than this and more warning time. If I were aiming to get the attention of random passing weekender traffic, I’d start the signs way back at the previous village, kilometres back, and put up several signs all along the way. Warning that there are only 5kms to go to the pottery, then 3 and 2 and 1. Then Finally, turn here for pottery at the crossing. But not today.

We are open as part of the Southern Highlands Arts Festival, Open Studios, Arts Trail. There has been plenty of advertising in all the usual forms. So today I am only aiming to direct the people who are looking for us using the excellent fold out map that has been widely distributed both in hard copy and electronically. This is a case of courtesy directions. I still have a lot to do today. We are never really completely ready for these things. There is always so much to do, we could easily go on for weeks cleaning up. We live in a kind of organised chaos, where we plan lots of things and make lists. We even make lists of the lists. But then something happens and we have to change plans to fix the problem. Everything else slips off the list until this urgent thing, whatever it is, gets done. We kind of lurch from crisis to crisis in a semi-ordered fashion.

We are still sorting the last few boxes of pots and final pricing when the first of the early visitors arrive. I still have a few pots that need to have their bases ground, a few more things to sort out. I flip a piece of filter cloth over the pile of boxes and welcome our guests. The weekend has started. We are busy all day with only a couple of short breaks when there is no one in the pottery. A time to try and snatch some lunch, but then another car arrives. We manage to get to eat our lunch in stages, taking turns. It’s pretty constantly busy. Last year was our best year ever on the Arts Trail. It was the tenth year. This 11th year is shaping up pretty well so far. I notice that the ‘kintsugi’ pots repaired with gold are pretty popular. Possibly because they are the same price and all the others, even though they sport a bit of bling. They are repaired ‘2nds’ after-all, Pots that have been repaired and upgraded or enhanced back to a 1st grade status through a lot of time, effort and skill. Plus the addition of real 24 carat gold! So it’s hard to charge more for them, even though they represent a lot of extra work.

I’ve noticed over the years that my better pieces, which tend to be more expensive, don’t sell very well from here at the studio. This is how galleries earn their living. It’s their job to know people with fine taste and specific knowledge about certain works. Some of these aesthetes are also well healed, so can afford to have developed fine taste. Others go without food to pay for their art ‘habit’. It takes all kinds. So this pottery open studio sale is just that. A chance to get to look inside a working potters studio and see what we make and how we do it. I spend a bit of time throughout the day showing visitors around the workshop and kiln shed. Explaining the processes that we use and how it differs from the norm. I have a serried rank of rock crushers and grinders, culminating in a large ball mill and drying bed area. This is necessary, because all my exhibition work is made, not from clay, like all other potters, but from ground up stones, gravels and ashes that I collect locally and process on site here. Added to this that all our work is wood fired. It gives the work a particular look and feel.

What we make isn’t unique, but it does have a particular character.

After all, they are just bowls, cups and plates!

Open Studio

Posted on 30/10/2016 by hotnsticky

The Southern highlands Arts Festival is upon us, and so are the Open Studio Weekends are starting this next weekend of the 5th and 6th of November and followed on the next weekend of the 12th and 13th.

Two firings in 7 days

We have the kiln unpacked and re-packed and ready to fire in 5 days. This is only possible because I had all the pots made and bisque fired before I left to go to do my research in Korea. All we have to do now is glaze them and make sure that they are well dried before packing them into the kiln. I have learnt from experience that if I pack my thick felspathic glazes wet. They can just fall off from the outside of the pots. Especially from the underside of bowls.

It has been too hot and dry to fire for the past 2 days, so today has been forecast to be overcast and showery. I wake at 4.00am, just like clockwork. I amaze myself that I can do this, but it just happens. I read an article in ‘NewScientist’ magazine recently about our brains ability to track time accurately, even when supposedly asleep. The article maintained that only part of our brain sleeps. A lot of it stays well awake, and is a very good time-keeper. I know this as a fact for me and my brain, but I can’t speak for others. I thought that I had taught myself to do this as an art student. Waking up every two hours to turn up the gas pressure on the kiln. I could wake up just a minute or two before the alarm went off. I didn’t like the alarm, so I taught myself to pre-empt it by a minute or so to avoid its harsh reality. Apparently, I’m not at all special. Loads of people can do this with no effort. It’s apparently quite normal. Ho-hum! There goes my last claim to be able to do something ‘special’.

We have the wood all cut and dried, up in the wood shed, we have all the pots bisque fired and stacked in the pottery. All the stones have been ground up and powdered. All the ashes have been dry sieved and bagged. All the glazes are made up and tested. Nothing can go wrong now!

The firing proceeds well, very well. Just as it ought to after 48 years of learning. Starting in the quiet at 4.00 am and firing through into the night. I like the quiet of the very early morning. I can get a few minor things done while I’m confined here, once the kindling stage is over and I start to put big logs into the main firebox. I can steal a few minutes at a time to clean up my work bench and grind the bottoms of the pots that we just unpacked from the last firing. The Lovely wakes up with the light and brings me down some breakfast and a pot of freshly plunged coffee. We have fruit salad and marmalade from the pantry to put on our toast. It’s a nice quiet time together.

In the middle of the day I’m well into the reduction cycle and using quite large, heavy logs, that can burn for 40 to 50 mins. This gives me time to do other jobs that demand a bit more attention. I decide to repair the coffee cup from the last firing that caught a falling piece of kiln brick. I spend a bit of time on it, grinding and polishing the brick fragment away to nothing, then polishing the remnants of the glazed rim back to a fine finish. I decide that since I’ve spent so much time on it. I will keep it for myself to use in the kitchen. I decide to do some Japanese inspired ‘kintsugi’ repair on it. Janine takes over while I concentrate.

I rebuild the surface back to its original profile and then finish it with some 24 carat gold. This of course takes me several days, just a few minutes at a time, whenever I can fit it in. I do a batch of ‘less-than-perfect’ pots from the last firing. They all turn out OK. They are still ‘2nds’, but seconds that have been shown a bit of attention and care. Their ‘flawed’ surfaces turned to a thing of beauty, with some time, love and respect. Just as we do for each other. We shine when we are loved. These pots now glow in a simple honest way.

For some reason, I can’t help but think of dentistry!

Best wishes
Steve

Winsome, Loose Some

Posted on 25/10/2016 by hotnsticky

We have unpacked the latest firing and it was largely good, some of it is quite good. A bit of it is very good, but as always there is the odd disaster. I sport a winsome smile.

One single disaster was completely my fault. I made up a batch of glaze that has always been straight forward. Porcelain stone and limestone. I got distracted when someone called in and It seems that I forgot to add the limestone, so I have a bowl with what is essentially a coating of porcelain body. Not attractive.

The walls of my kiln are slowly dissolving with the build-up of wood ash. But not bad for 60 firings for home-made lightweight insulating refractories made from local bauxite!

Another casualty this firing was a piece of wall that spalled off and landed on the lip of one of my cups. I may be able to recover it with some judicious grinding and polishing. However, I ask myself if it really is worth half an hours work to make a 2nd grade mug worth $10 out of this ruin? It is quite pretty though. I may decide to spend a bit of time working on it and keep it for myself in the studio. This ‘mishap’ is not my fault, except in that I chose to build my kiln out of my own inferior, local, hand-made, fire bricks

I usually test all new batches of glaze that we mix up, before using them on-mass. I did just this last week to test all the new batches of domestic ware glazes that we were about to use to glaze all the pots for the next firing, destined for the Southern Highlands Open Studios weekend sales. I fired the little portable wood fired kiln with test pieces and small bowls. They all worked perfectly and melted well. The colours that i get in a 2 1/2 hour firing in reduction to stoneware, cone 10, are not as clear and intense as what we get in the bigger kiln firing for 16 hours and with a much slower cooling. However the difference is only really marginal and the faster firing is just fine for domestic ware.

I photographed both sets of tests and there isn’t a whole lot of difference. There is better reduction, especially for carbon sequestration glazes, in the longer sustained reduction firing, and the granite and pegmatite celadons are richer. Funnily, the ching-bai porcelain glaze, on the right, looks pretty indistinguishable!

The tragic, sand-paper-like porcelain-stone glaze, sans limestone, was made up after this test firing, as an afterthought, so missed out on being test fired.

We have just re-packed the kiln to fire again. This firing will have what I hope will be a new opalescent jun ash glaze. Here’s hoping! Ash is always so variable. We have to test each batch of ash and find the differences from the last batch, then alter the recipe accordingly. What is sometimes a blue opalescent glaze can quickly become a yellow crystalline glaze or a white matt. It changes from ‘nuka’ white through to transparent green glass with minor variations of ingredients. It always requires felspar and silica to be added. Luckily, porcelain stone is largely composed of felspar and silica. I love it so much when it works!

There is something so rewarding about using the ash from the fire that cooked our dinner to make our glazes! There is something so truly organic and particularly rounded about the concept of waste-not/want-not, and self-reliance about this. Glazes like this are firmly embedded in my sense of place and my sense of self-in-place.

I couldn’t want for more – except perhaps a more reliable and richer opalescent blue?

I pass the glaze through a fine sieve and although we have already dry sieved the ash beforehand, there is always a lot of material that refuses to pass through the fine screen. I scrape it off the mesh and put it in the large mortar and pestle. I give it a good few minutes hand grinding, until it doesn’t sound or feel gritty anymore. I know from past experience that it still will not all go through, but a lot of it will. I was lucky to see this 450 mm dia mortar and pestle in a junk shop and snapped it up. It’s a beauty! It dwarfs my Leach kick wheel.

The kiln is bricked-up and ready to fire now. The weather is a bit warm and dry, so we decide to post-pone the firing until Thursday when a shower or two and some damp weather is forecast. This will be a much safer day to fire.

Ashes to ashes and lust to lust
Steve and Janine

Be Prepared

Posted on 21/10/2016 by hotnsticky

I realise that I’m awake and I’m not going to get back to sleep. It’s 4.00 am and we are all ready to fire the kiln today. I usually wake up at about this time on firing days. It’s a habit that I have got into. I like to start early. I love the quiet of the early morning. It’s beautiful. There is a very special time. Just a half hour, when the birds start to wake up and so does the sun in response to their chippering and calling. They have very fine senses. They are awake and calling when it is still dark. I can’t tell the difference with my old worn out eyes. but they know and call out to tell each other. They summon the sun.

We packed the kiln yesterday and bricked up the door with our home-made fire brick blocks. It’s a big door for easy access for packing, so we needed some large blocks to speed up the door bricking-up process. Making our own firebrick is just one of the many things that we do to live this life of self-reliance. The sun was loosing its heat as drove up to the wood yard and loaded the truck with both pine and stringybark logs. We are all finished before the evening dusk falls. The truck sits in the dark and is slowly revealed this early morning as the sun comes around the curve and slowly illuminates the house and orchard in the distance.

We have a new wood shed now, so all the pine is stacked and ready to load, dry and seasoned. Such luxury! it’s only taken us 40 years to get this small convenience built. There is always so much to do. We have lists! Even lists of lists. But ultimately, it’s a case of the squeaky wheel getting the oil. But now the time is here for a kiln wood, wood shed and it’s a beauty. We’ve had a wood shed for the house wood, particularly for the kitchen stove timber. We couldn’t function here in this self-reliant way without one. That was a very squeaky wheel and got built after only 10 years here. This masterpiece of re-cycling cost next to nothing, being made out of the old wooden tank stand and old roofing iron that we were given. It’s only taken us 40 years to get around to it!

We are officially into the bushfire season now, so there are fire restrictions in place. Luckily for us today, it is overcast and there are showers forecast. It has just started to rain gently, but just a brief shower. I don’t even bother to cover the pine on the truck. Last night I called the fire captain to tell him that we were going to fire the kiln. It’s a polite notification. We have been here 40 years doing this with no problems so far. That is largely because we are very careful. During the spring, we pack the kiln and wait for a suitable day to fire. A day like this is excellent. Cool, overcast and with this brief shower of rain, it couldn’t be better for firing. The safest of conditions. If it were very hot and windy, we wouldn’t light the kiln. We’d just pack it and leave it full and wait for a break in the weather.

When Janine gets up, she brings me breakfast by the kiln. We eat all our meals during the day down in the kiln shed. We get a visit from the chooks, who call in to see what going on. We fire through into the night. It’s a civilised, steady, easy firing process. With all the wood already cut, split and seasoned in advance. This prepared wood that we are burning, is work that we did months ago in preparation for this moment. To make our lives easier now. We make decisions and make preparations for the future in this way so that we can keep on working, and living this life into our older years.

We finish the firing at night, on the same day that we started. Packing and firing the kiln is an intense couple of days. We celebrate the end of the firing with a bottle of bubbly. I cook pasta for dinner. It’s quick and simple, using all our own home-grown ingredients, preserved tomato pasta sauce, our own garlic, our dried tomatoes and dried mushrooms. It’s just like our firing, everything prepared in advance to make this moment of creation easier.

Best wishes

from the well prepared Steve and Janine, working towards the up-coming Southern Highlands Arts Trail, Open Studio weekends. We will be open on the first two weekends of November.

Hit The Ground Running

Posted on 12/10/2016 by hotnsticky

It’s always good to be home and re-united with my 4 girls.

I have a lot to do. Jobs that have built up while I’ve been away. I hit the ground running. We have 3 weekend workshop booked in for wood firings over the next 3 weekends. We have a lot of bisque-ware ready to be glazed for the Southern Highlands Arts Trail Open Studio Weekends that are coming up, but we can’t get access to our wood kiln until we finish all the workshops.

The effort that we put in to preparation pays off, as all the weekends go smoothly and everyone leaves with something nice to make all the effort worthwhile. And we are lucky with the weather too. It blows a gale all week, and then it settles down and we have a glorious weekend of still, sunny days.

We fire the big wood kiln overnight through the weekend, taking shifts of 4 hours and overlapping each change of personal by 2 hours, so that there is always some continuity. The nights are cold and we huddle near the firebox for warmth. This is a downdraught ‘Bourry’ style firebox, so there isn’t very much to do most of the time.

If we stoke with big pieces of hardwood. It might take up to one hour for those logs to burn down sufficiently to allow another stoke. The kiln climbs slowly in an even, steady, reducing atmosphere.

The next weekend we have a low temperature wood firing workshop. We have half a dozen small wood fired kilns that we use throughout the day. We have 10 participants, who each bring 5 or 6 pots to fire, depending on size. We get through them all in the day, along with half a dozen wheel-barrow loads of wood.

When the day is over, we pack away all the little kilns, except for one. I leave it out and pack it with my glaze tests for all the new batches of glazes that have made up for the next big wood firing. It will have a lot of work in there for the ArtsTrail Open Studios Weekends. I want to make sure that I haven’t made any mistakes or poor assumptions, when making-up these glazes.

I pack the kiln in the morning and start to fire straight away. I push it along, as I have other things to do this afternoon. This little beauty breaks all previous records and cruises up the cone 10 in just 2 1/2 hours in reduction. The results are really quite good. Everything is well melted. There is no flashing in such a short firing. Nor is there very intense reduction colour, but all the colours are there – only paler than I would expect from a longer wood firing. I’m finished by lunchtime and can get on with other things.

I even surprise my self! I didn’t know that this sort of speed was possible for a stoneware firing, and with so little effort.

The garden is producing well, with Nina in charge in my absence, she decides to have the evening baking and makes a couple of lovely dishes. A leek pie with a little bit of sour cream and a wholemeal crust, topped with some grated tasty cheese, which is amazing, followed with a berry pie with a baked sponge topping. Served with Edmonds custard. Yum! It’s an economical, warming, dinner on a cold evening. All this garden produce is a fitting reward for all the hours of weeding and watering. However, we don’t do it to save money, but to enjoy wholesome, unpolluted, fresh food.

Over the years, we have made decisions that have allowed us to be in control of much of our lives, but nothing is perfect, nothing is finished and nothing lasts!

Enjoy the moment.

	New pots for the Ope… on More rain and tasting cid…
	The Old Wood Heater… on Zen and the Art of Maintenance…
	Jan 25, 2019: Progre… on Solar PV Fired Pottery Ki…
	Jan 25, 2019: Progre… on Driving on Sunshine
	Okawachiyama: The Se… on Okawachiyama, The Secret Villa…

Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic

Steve Harrison and Janine King's other Hot and Sticky web site

Author Archives: hotnsticky