Category Archives: cooking

Poetry and Madness 3

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I am now just over half way through my sojourn here in Korea. 5 weeks to go. How am I going? 

Well, I’m only certain of two things, and that is Death and Taxes. I’m hoping that nether of them catch up with me here to spoil my stay!

Amazingly, I am just about where I would like to be in terms of my progress. I have almost finished all the throwing. From now on it will be all about drying, bisqueing, glazing and wood firing. Thankfully I don’t have to cut, split and stack all my own wood!

So far I haven’t really left my studio/flat for more than a few hours in 6 weeks. I work all day, everyday, and its starting to pay off. My making skills and my ability to see in advance what is happening to these massive lumps of spinning jelly-like, floppy, sericite paste, as it slowly degrades under the force of gravity back down towards the wheel head. I have learnt to feel what is about to happen and what I need to do in the precise moment and order to get the outcome that I want. Knowing when to stop is a key lesson. Perfection is out of my reach at this level, ‘good enough’ turns out to be the highest level of things that I can achieve at this time. But I’m OK with that. I’m just so glad to be able to be here and have this humiliating experience of failing at almost every turn. But I hope to achieve just a few elegant jars to leave behind, that I can be proud of.

Making a ‘good-enough’ Moon Jar is quite demanding for various reasons. Firstly, they are huge, needing 10, or 12 or 15 kilos of clay to make just one half. Secondly, They are made from porcelain clay that is quite floppy and non-plastic, compared to stoneware or earthenware clays. Thirdly, the shape is a very difficult one to master, even with good plastic clay. The aim is to make a very open, wide, fully rounded, bowl shape with a very small foot. This is the shape most likely to squat down and collapse if not made carefully. That is why it is made in two pieces. But even then, it’s not easy in porcelain.

So when these three elements are combined, throwing large lumps of floppy clay, into a very wide shape, but with a tiny foot, there isn’t much to hold it up. I can only offer ‘good will’ and the little bit of skill that I have to help it along.

I’m in awe of those early Korean potters here who managed this impossible feat of throwing, while working on a wooden kick wheel with absolutely no momentum, working these huge, beautiful rounded, flowing forms, while kicking with both feet, one towards, and one away, alternately, to keep the wheel moving. Keeping both feet in action while holding your hands steady in space is something akin to ballet. BUT, not just holding those hands steady, Actually applying considerable pressure to the clay the slow it right down as well.

I could have made more progress, if I’d worked alongside somebody who knew what they were doing. All I’ve got up my sleeve is what I’ve retained from watching some good Korean throwers here in Bangsan in 2018, eight years ago, during a Moon Jar conference. Not a lot was learnt, and most of it forgotten, What I’m learning here now is invaluable, as every mistake and failure is painfully burnt into my memory banks. 

You really have to have your wits about you. I’m learning how to best approach this difficult task. The order of moves, the thickness of the clay in different parts at different stages of the lifting and opening of the evolving shape. If it were just a simple ‘vase’ shape, coming up off the wheel in a straight line up and out, like an inverted cone, it would stand up more easily, but two of these straight sided vase shapes won’t make a sphere. A sphere needs to have a small elegant foot ring, then opening up and out in a curve, away from the wheel head towards the horizontal, then curving around and back, upwards to the rim. An ‘ogee’ line of curve. A completely impossible shape to be self-supporting in soft, floppy non-plastic porcelain.  Who was the genius who first thought of this extravagance in white porcelain?

I’ve dropped a few shapes while getting it right, but I have a better appreciation of the way to best get it done now. Added to the above is the tendency for the non-plastic porcelain clay to absorb water and dry out on the surface causing your fingers to ‘stick’ or ‘grip’ every so often. All throwers have experienced this at some point, but with small pots made from plastic clay, it is recoverable. If this happens while making a moon jar, it is the end of that pot. A stretch and wobble in the form that cannot be corrected is established and there is nothing that can be done to recover it. I’ve tried. Best not to waste any time on it. Just stop, wedge it up and start again. I’ve learnt to hold a wet sponge in my hand between my fingers, and to give a little gentle squeeze more or less continuously, to keep the surface lubricated, but only just so, to avoid any ‘sticking’, but not too much so as to saturate the surface and cause the form to go weak at the knees, resulting in slumping and collapse.

Another lesson was learning to ‘condition’ the new wooden plywood batts. Fresh batts appear to be OK, and would be for every other purpose, but not for large porcelain moon jar bowls. I lost two in a row before I realised that the fresh wood didn’t allow the clay to ’stick’ to the surface well enough. So that when I flipped the bowl over, up-side-down to place it on top of the base bowl, it just peeled off the batt onto the floor. Hard lesson, well learnt. I scrubbed the batts with clay slip and saturated the surface before using them again. success two days later. But so many little set-backs, one after the other, leading to losses is disheartening. But good life lessons in perseverance!

I have also come the the conclusion that 15 kgs is my maximum limit for lifting and flipping over large bowl forms. Any more might lead to a hernia?

I’ve also learnt to be very careful in staging my drying and stiffening technique to make the best connection between the two halves. I’ve had a few crack along the joint in drying. One from not taking enough care to get the consistency and stiffness just right at the time of joining. Too soft and the shape distorts or worse, collapses. Too dry and the pot stands up to the stress of joining and paddling, but the joint can be too dry and fail in drying. I learnt to stiffen the body of the form, particularly the lower section that will have to take all the weight, while keeping the rims soft and moist for adhesion. This is not just about drying it out, but allowing the natural tendency of clay to ’set’ as some kind of thixatropia sets up between the clay particles. Letting the form sit quietly over night aids this. So making a large jar takes time and patience.

However, if the rims are kept too soft, there is a good joint, but as the pot dries, the wetter rim part shrinks more than the rest of the pot, pulls in and the curve flattens out at the mid point of the sphere, making a flat spot. I’ve seen hints of it in a few of the old Moon Jars in Museums, but also on many contemporary moon jars. A successful join, but a compromised form.

So far I’ve made beautiful round spheres with cracks in their joints after drying, as well as well joined bowls, that didn’t crack, but with less than successful round forms, lacking elegance. They both met my hammer.

Another issue that I have had to come to terms with is picking up the joined form, which is now 20 kgs or more, leather hard, slightly soft and a little bit slippery and then turning it over, up-side-down, so as to be able to trim the foot. This kind of weight should really be a two person job. But Janine’s not here! So I have developed a way to do it on my own, slowly and carefully, but it is at the limit of my capacity now at this age. I’m not the man I once was. so I have to look after myself. Fortunately I have developed a large tummy in my advancing age, and this has turned out to be very useful in supporting the shape while I lean back and very gently manoeuvre it up-side-down with my hands. Note to self! Don’t wear a shirt with buttons!

A good Moon Jar is a complex piece of work, requiring sound throwing technique, staged drying, good timing, humidity management, correct joining and compression, careful turning and slow, even drying. And all this before we even start to think about glazing and firing! Yes, there certainly is some madness! But when it works, there is poetry!

I have made about 25 good large jars now, another dozen medium sizes and about 40 smaller jars. a couple of days ago, I had my first bisque firing with half of my work in it. I used the large trolly kiln up in the other studio area, up the hill. I booked the Museums truck to drive them up there, instead of walking up there and back 20 times carrying one jar at a time! Nothing broke or chipped on the way thankfully.

When I arrived here it was the end of winter and the fields were being ploughed getting ready for the spring planting. They have to wait until may around here to be safe from the last frost. I watched them prepare the paddies, plough them twice, to mulch in the previous crop stubble, flood them and then rotary-hoe them again a couple of times. They spend a lot of time working and reworking the walls of the field by hand with a shovel. Building up the edges above water line and then patting the surface down, compressing it with the back of the shovel. It takes hours. However, they save time elsewhere, by avoiding the back breaking work of planting out the rice seedlings. Forty years ago, I was in Japan and watched women doing this back-breaking work. These days they have very cleaver machines that they load up with trays and trays of seedlings. The machine then proceeds slowly across the paddy planting 10 seedlings every second at a spacing of 200mm, apart, doing 2 metre wide rows with each pass. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. So fast and efficient.

I’ve also watched the landscape change from brown to green as the frosted, burnt pasture responded to the warmth and light. There was a tall pasture that had over wintered here, shooting up to a flowering head. At first I assumed that it was a grain crop, but soon realised, as they mowed it down, that it was a fodder crop for making hay. I walked down the lane to get a good look at it, it turned out to be rye, which takes the cold well and is over-wintered here. The smell from the paddock was so sweet, almost sickly sweet. There was so much sugar stored up in those emerging flowering heads. Harvested before it set into grain and turned to starch. They make huge round bales and plastic coat them. I’m assuming that with some residual moisture, it must be some form of silage? Stored for next winter’s fodder?

I miss being able to harvest my own vegetables from my own garden. So much so, I planted one just outside the studio. A mixture of some seedlings to get things going quickly and some seeds in-between to fill out the space as the first plants mature and are harvested. This garden isn’t really for me, as I will be gone in 6 weeks time, before most of the produce matures. I created it for the other residents that will still be here after I leave.

I have also found time to build a wood fired pizza oven. Using a lot of broken bricks that were sitting around in small piles here and there, up around the wood kiln area. I built the oven up on top of a retaining wall, just opposite my wood kiln, so we can cook pizzas while we fire through the night. Again, this little side project isn’t really for me, but my contribution to the creative community that will be living, working and creating here for years to come into the future.   At a time when a lot of the world is in so much conflict and every thing that we thought was stable is starting to come apart at the seams. I am so lucky to be an Australian, Sitting out on our own in the Pacific, we are missing out on so much of that conflict. However, when the pooh hits the propellor, nowhere is safe!

Here the Koreans are technically still at war. There are still landmine warning signs in various places around here, as there was never any really complete clean-up of the mines after the conflict ground down to a stand-off. Something they take for granted around here, but I found it quite shocking when I first encountered one of those land mine warning signs on a strand of wire, not too far from here. on something almost like some sort of old disused fence. Luckily I had my phone and its translation app to tell me to stay well away. We are only a few kms from the final DMZ line here.

As the social norms that we thought might sustain us are broken, the rule of law is degraded and there is a huge up-sweep in the far right of politics, based on miss-information, fear, lies, xenophobia, hate and miss-trust. These events can lead to some feelings of insecurity and alienation. I want to counter that, by creating things that bring people together. Every Friday, I bake bread there in my tiny studio to share with the other residents. A wholesome mixture of wholemeal and rye, that you can’t buy around here. I have also started to host a weekly pizza night in my little space. Last week we also shared a kimchi a pancake night, made by the lady next door, using my huge bag of kimchi that I was given when I arrived here, while I contributed banana pancakes with a little ice cream and cinnamon on top.  I have also made rock cakes to share at morning tea and marmalade, as such a thing doesn’t exist here. I like to have a little on my homemade toast, whenever I feel a little twinge of nostalgia for home.

I want to help create a sharing, supporting community out of these individual artists. We are mostly here for a short time, so there is a constantly changing group dynamic. I replaced someone. Another person left after I was here just one month, I only met her once! Two more artists will leave at the end of this month, and I will leave and the end of next. 

However ephemeral life is, I want to leave a positive trace behind – at least for a while. I want to leave this artists residency in a better, more inclusive, comfortable and fun creative state than it was when I arrived. 

One pizza at a time!

These Busy Autumn Days

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This week we have been working on several projects simultaneously, a few hours of each job alternately over the course of the day.

I start at 6:00 am each morning straight after I wake up, I walk over to the pottery and switch on the electric kiln. I need to start early as the days are short at this time of year. The kiln starts it’s firing program running on the battery supply of yesterdays sunshine. The kiln only draws a small amount of energy at the start of the firing, but ramps up over the day, such that it draws the maximum power at the end of the firing. I want the firing to finish when there is still some good sunshine available. 2 to 3 pm is a good time to finish.

I have programmed the glaze firing schedule to take 8 1/2 hours, more or less. Each of the electric kilns has a different and individual capacity to achieve any particular temperature rise at high temps. Depending on the age of the electrical elements. As the elements get older, they loose power, so the firing takes longer at high temperatures. One of the kilns, the big fibre kiln, has brand new elements that I have only just wound and installed, so is capable of 200+ degrees C per hour. However, one of the smaller kilns is quite old and the elements are pretty much worn out, so can only just manage 30 degree per hour at the top temps.

I like the firings to finish in the afternoon while there is still sufficient sun shine to recharge the battery before sunset. I’ve been doing a lot of firings this last couple of months. Firing my 20 or so moon jars, first to bisque, then stoneware glaze, and finally to 750oC for lustre, gold or enamel firings. To make sure that I stay within my energy creation budget limits, I only fire one glaze kiln each day. However, I can fire two small bisque kilns or two gold firings, and still have plenty of solar power for everything else. I was recently given a very old, and very large ‘Hilldav’ brick lined electric kiln from my lovely friend Robin. Thank you Robin! It certainly drains everything out of the system when it is fired. It needs 33 amps on 3 phases to run. That’s a lot of juice! Not many potters have that much power available in their studios. I save firing this kiln for times when I need such a big capacity to fit in larger work. When I got it, it has a broken door lock, that needed welding back on, it also needed a decent bit of work to control the rampant rust, repairs to the top, new insulation over the arch and work on the left front lifting lug and a new door seal. But it’s all good now.

On the left, the small and large fibre kilns. On the right the Big Hilldav and small Rhode brick kilns

While the kiln fires automatically, We get out in the garden early, straight after breakfast to beat the heat. There is so much that needs to be done at this time of the year. Autumn is the time for a big ‘end-of-summer’ clean out and replanting. The compost heap is now full to the brim again, but it will soon rot down to make more space for ongoing additions.

After lunch it is often too hot for us to be working out side, if it is a sunny day, so we retreat inside. Sometimes to help our son with his fruit cordial business, by peeling fruit, or processing herbs. Yesterday, Janine and I spent the afternoon outside on the verandah, Janine stripping lemon myrtle leaves from their branches, and me milling them down to a fine powder, before freezing them to preserve the lively, zesty, lemon fragrance.

Lemon Myrtle and Lemon Verbena are both deciduous, so the leaves need to be collected now and the plants cut back, ready to over-winter, before they re-shoot in the spring. They are hung under the verandah to dry. There is always plenty of citrus fruit ripening over the winter, for citrus fruit cordials. We grow 16 different varieties of citrus trees in the citrus grove. However, we need to collect, dry, mill and freeze the Myrtle and Verbena leaves into powder, now, while we have them, to fill out the flavour profile, as needed, when that time comes, later in winter. 

Milling dried Lemon Myrtle leaves into a fine powder, before freezing it to preserve the Zing!

After dinner I made an apple tart tartin, as we have plenty of apples at the moment.

An beautiful autumn desert.

My New Book on Clay Making for Potters

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Janine and I taught a clay making workshop over the weekend. We all learnt a bit of clay theory, made some push-pull, coil-tests and shrinkage bar tests. We looked at Kaolins, Ball clays and Illites, we even dipped into Fire Clays and Bentonites. After lunch We tested Porcelains, Sericites and Halloysites – seriously white and pure kaolin-like clays that are very useful for blending and making porcelain bodies. We also investigated plasticisers, pH testing and beneficiation.

Lastly we went into the clay making room and loaded up the dough mixer with everything that we had learnt, a blend of clays that we had studied and tested in the morning, and proceeded to make 150 kgs of plastic stoneware clay body. We pugged it, bagged it, and then everyone got to take home a bag for their own use in their studio, as well as some fresh organic produce from the vegetable garden and orchards.

The last half hour was taken up with sweeping and mopping the workshop floor. Getting everything back to the way it was before we started.

I think that everyone learnt something over the course of the day. I handed out printed notes and lots of people took photos and videos of the materials, tests and the equipment.

I have spent some time over the past while collecting, sorting and collating together all my old notes, recipes and technical information that I have collected over my lifetime of teaching clay theory in Universities, TAFE colleges and Art Schools. I have up-dated all this experience and theoretical data into a new book called ‘Clays’.

Screenshot

Available directly from me for $50 + pack and post.

I still have places left in the tool making weekend workshop on the 14th of March. If anyone is interested.

The vegetable garden is very prolific in late summer, the early tomatoes are finishing up and the later planted toms are just starting to ripen. Besides tomatoes, we have and abundance of egg plant/aubergines, potatoes, capsicums, zucchinis and cucumbers. So Passata making is always a weekly job.

This last few weeks we have been thinking of ways of using up the super abundance of our glossy, purple aubergines. It’s turned out to be our best season yet for growing these plump, round, shiny fruit. Pan fired in a little olive oil, then lid on to steam the slices, is quick and simple as a side dish. A Greek style moussaka came next, I even bought some beef mince! A once a year extravagance. Then Janine made a potato, tomato, aubergine bake. All yummy.

The new chickens are all settling in together pretty well now and the new trio of pullets are laying well. So we now have an abundant supply of eggs again. Janine made a stunning savoury soufflé for dinner. Spectacular and delicious. Eggs never tasted so good.

In our ‘spare’ time, we have been helping our son with his cordial making business. Everything is hand made here in our kitchen from fresh fruit, some of it from our garden and orchard, but we don’t grow enough to keep him in business, so he also collects fruit from our friends and neighbours orchards and gardens. Luckily, there is a very good family run commercial orchard just a few kms away, and they have discount priced sub-prime fruit that isn’t good enough to go to the markets, but is excellent for making fruit cordials.

I made a rather nice fruit tart. A peach and almond frangipane. Nice!

I even made a special sweet patisserie -style butter and almond, short pastry to bake it in. Impossible to work with! So short and crumbly. Luckily, I have spent 45 years working with porcelain, so I could manage! I was so chuffed with that one, I got busy and made another two with pears and prunes.

I got an early start on planting brassicas last year, so we have already finished the first flowering of cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages. The second planting is now just ripening up to good sized heads.

I have been having a pretty constant battle to keep blackbirds out of the garden. They squeeze in through the smallest of holes in the old plastic garden netting. I have spent hours going around patching the holes with spare pieces of netting. The little buggers get in and then can’t find the hole to get out again. I have to run them back and forth, up and down the garden until they fly out of the open gate. It’s frustrating. They love to get into the mulch and compost like chooks and scratch out worms and bugs, but they also scratch out all the little seedlings as well. I have taken to covering over new plantings of seeds with fine insect netting to protect them until they are big enough to survive the blackbird onslaught.

The main problem is that the plastic netting is almost 30 years old and is now very brittle, so tears very easily. Even a small birds beak seems to be able to break the filaments. The plastic bird netting was laid over the original galvanised ‘chook wire’ netting. That rusted out very early on. The solution is to take it all down and rebuild the whole thing. Frame and all, as the frame was built on ‘green’ poles in the ground. Several of these were burnt off at ground level in the bush fire in 2019. The fire also melted all the plastic mesh on the West and partially on the East. As well as random places on the roof and along the North and South walls. The whole thing only survived the inferno because it was built directly behind the big barn, which has fire fighting sprinklers on it, so was only partially burnt. It shielded most of the garden frame from the intense heat.

I repaired some of the old poles and replaced the melted netting, but it’s a mess of patches and wonkey pressed-metal rafters deformed by the heat. 

We visited a beautiful garden nursery recently, where the owner had a fantastic metal framed veggie garden all brand new and perfect. The frame was built out of galvanised RHS steel section all welded together, with 12mm. sq. aviary netting. I was envious. I asked who build it and the cost. A local guy did it for $20,000, and its less than 1/6th of the size of our vegetable garden. So that was an easy choice! 

Our garden is 36 metres by 12 metres. We wont be spending $100,000 on getting our netting frame rebuilt. I guess that I’ll be doing it myself, slowly, over time, just like everything else here. But I will need to start on it soon! As it will involve a lot of ladder work. I need to get it done before I turn 60! As I’m not allowed to climb ladders after that. 

I’m 74 now, so must rush to get it done before 60 comes around again! Even doing it all myself, just the cost of buying the galvanised steel RHS tubing and galvanised Sq. netting will be eye watering!

But if it lasts another 30 years. It will see me out.

Moon Jars, clay and 3rd Tool Making workshop announced

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We have just completed the 2nd Moon Jar Making workshop, with the 3rd and last for this year going ahead next weekend. Great progress was made learning to throw and assemble the shapes that go to create a traditional, fully rounded, spherical shape pot on the potters wheel.

This morning our first job is to deal with a lot of fruit that has been falling off the trees during this last weekend of very hot weather.

Janine dealt with the peaches and I decided to juice the pears.

Summer is a busy time in the orchards and garden. Inadvertently, we grow more than we can eat in real time. so we cook, preserve, stew and bottle the excess, but also share the largess with the students that come to the workshops and give more away to our friends and neighbors.

I have a few people on my waiting list wanting to do a tool making workshop. If I can get two more takers, then it will go ahead on the 14th of March. Please reply if you are interested. Otherwise it will roll over to next year.

Tomorrow, I’ll be making clay again, as these last couple of workshops and the one already booked out for next weekend, will pretty much exhaust most of my remaining stock of aged plastic clay.

One thing flows into another at this busy time of year. I went up to Sydney and bought a pallet of raw materials to enable me to keep making clay into the coming year. There is $1,000 worth of clay body material on that pallet. By the time that I’ve processed it, paying my self a very modest wage, my clay costs $2.50 per kilo. If I were to add on some sort of margin to allow for running a business, insurance, wear and tear, electricity etc. Then the clay would cost $4.00 a kilo. $40.00 for a 10kg bag. Which is more or less what you pay at the craft shop.

It seems like such a lot of money, but this is the reality of modern life and business. Things keep going up all the time. Janine and I live mostly in a fantasy world of our own creation. Being so self sufficient and self reliant here, it’s easy to loose track of the price of things. The once a year purchase of materials, like this, apart from being shocked by the price, it is also a lesson in international trade and the actions of multi-national corporations’ cut throat policies. 

Ceramic materials that were once readily available locally, have nearly all been bought-out and closed down, with imported similar materials brought in to replace them, always from the 3rd world. I have to keep testing the new stuff to make sure what it is that I’m getting. You can’t just expect to do a simple substitution in your old recipe. I try very hard to use Australian raw materials for my workshop clay body. I buy in clays from Victoria, Southern NSW and Queensland to get a reliable consistent mix that is sufficiently plastic for wheel work. Regrettably, the fantastic plastic secondary kaolins from Gulgong are no longer mined. They are still there under the ground. But the sites are all locked up and then imported, very much more expensive materials are offered in their place. I used to buy the Gulgong kaolins at $400 a tonne. Now I’m asked to pay $100 for a 25 kg bag of the American kaolin that is the new substituted material. I don’t buy it. That’s a 10 times increase in price.

After tomorrows clay making session. I will have made up, mixed and twice pugged 2,000 kilos (2 tonnes) of clay in the past 12 months – and then given most of it away! Because I don’t charge for clay at my workshops, but I’m thinking that I might have to start. Maybe – First bag free, then $20 per pack after that?

I go into town once a week to do some shopping, mostly to buy protein. Usually milk, fish, tofu and then sometimes either chicken or pork. Always organic and free range where that is an option. It is the most expensive part of any meal, but we buy very little of it.  Everything else we manage to do for our selves. We make do with what we can grow. This leads to a bit of monotony at times, so I put a bit of effort into varying our meals. At this time of year, every meal is a variation on ratatouille. Tomatoes, egg plant, capsicum, zucchini, broccoli and celery. I have to mix it up a bit, one night with tomato, the next without, sometimes with tofu, another night with mushrooms. Always with fresh garden herbs, which at this time of year nearly always includes either sweet basil or pesto, but I keep it varied, sometimes with a Thai basil, coriander, lemon grass and lime juice with fish sauce. Another time with Middle Eastern spices. The next with an East Asian flavour of oyster sauce, fresh ginger, always with loads of garlic and alternately fried off good olive oil or sesame oil.

There is always something going on here. We seem to be able to keep ourselves busy.

I’m keen to pass on some of the skills that I have learnt over my life. There is more or less nil ceramic technical skills content being taught in the few remaining ceramic courses being offered here these days. It’s all part of the lobotomisation of education, combined with the enshitification of everything else. 

We offer a brief, small, quiet experience of information/skills transfer in a creative environment. It’s a beautiful learning space, well lit and airy. I like to tell myself that the staff are alright too!

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.

Enjoy the moment.

Preparing for the new Year

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Well, Xmas is over, we survived the shopping madness by staying home and escaped the last minute rush to purchase more food than anyone could possibly consume. Janine and I stayed well out of it. We watered the garden and picked fresh vegetables made salads and tofu stir-frys. A very nice quiet time in all. I had no intension of going into town to check out the Boxing Day sales. I fact, instead, we had a lovely, small, family meal with our son and daughter-in-law, and took it very quietly. We shared a very nice bottle of wine with lunch. I cooked a somewhat rich potato dauphinois incorporating our potato and fennel, plus a tub of sour cream and garden herbs, which turned out very well.

I simmered the herbs in a little bit of milk to draw out the flavours, then layered the finely sliced fennel and potatoes with sour cream and poured the strained milk over and through it all. I finished the dish with a camembert cheese placed on top to melt through the dish. As if the tub of sour cream wasn’t quite enough, and topped it off the some grated 36 month aged cheddar.  I was happy with it and no one complained.

On the subject of potatoes, we have had a visit from a new and unusual bug into the veggie garden. Some sort of elongated, grey, shield bug. They group in pairs around the tender top shoots and suck the living daylights out of the growing tips of the potato plants. I haven’t seen these little critters before, so I had to look them up. They turn out to be a South East Asian ‘sweet-potato’ bug. Also known to be found in the North of South America and the Southern parts of North America. How they got here I have no idea. I can only surmise that with global heating, they are able to colonise newly warming fresh territories? So hello and hopefully good bye!

I’m sure that the garden shop will have any number of toxic sprays for them. However, they are quite susceptible to being squashed by hand! No poisons required, it’s highly selective, and no toxic residue is left behind. This organic ‘natural’ treatment seems to be working. I have noticed quite a few lady bugs on the potato leaves at this time also. Possibly they ere eating the minuscule shied beetle eggs? That would be nice if there was a local predator that could breed up to counter the new pest? Could life be so simple?

Someone once said that every complex problem has at least a dozen simple solutions – and they are all wrong! There is nothing quite so effective, accurate and environmentally friendly as well trained fingers. Time consuming, but 100% effective.

We have ended the year by making clay to prepare ourselves for the coming year.  I even sat down and threw a pot straight away to test out the plasticity of this new mix. It was beautiful! It will be even better after a couple of months in the cool, dark, clay store to age a little.

As we are hosting a 4 day summer school in the coming week, I cleaned out the pottery and transformed it back from a sales room for the Xmas sale and back into a throwing room. I took the opportunity to really clean down the benches and wheel tops, then gave them a coat of tung oil to protect the wood for another year. All this wood was milled on-site here from trees that we grew ourselves. I want to honour this timber and look after it. It’s just one small, but integral part of our 50 year history/legacy of living and thriving here.

All the timber now looks rich and glorious! While I was in wood working mode, I made a pile of paddles and wooden ‘anvils’. To be used in the coming workshop for forming and securing the joints of large pots. I made everything from off-cuts and prunings of trees in the garden and orchards, including apple, pear, cedar, juniper, pine and banksia.

Making beautiful pottery tools from timber that you have grown yourself is a very rewarding activity. I suspect that this is a special privilege available only to older potters, as you need to plan for it at least 40 years in advance! The old saying comes to mind – When is the best time to plant a tree? Answer, 20 years ago! We have earned these beautiful tools in more ways than one.

Every morning I wake up, I am gifted another 24 hours to enjoy the sunshine, fresh air, the people round me, the garden and the chance to be engaged in creative activity I really value this opportunity, and strive to make the most of it. In contrast, every morning I don’t wake to find that I am gifted $$$. A lot of people who chase money all their life, find that they have no time. In some ways, I am fantastically wealthy. I have never chased money, instead I have time. Time to be engaged in my creative life. I really value this meaningful and fully engaged life.

We recently hosted a tool making weekend, and taught other potters this evocative and rewarding skill. Beautifully hand crafted tools that you have made yourself embody extra meaning into the work that you make, if for no other reason than just from the emotional energy that you generate from the enjoyment of the activity of the handling and making. However, there could be more to it. 

In the pacific islands, there is a potent energy that they call ‘mana’. Not the christian goodies (manna) that drop from heaven, but a highly potent spiritual energy that is embodied in special objects at the time of their making, by unique and powerful individuals, or bestowed into objects by force of will by that unique, potent and powerful individual. It may be an object like a club, or spear, but also in jewellery and other personal objects. Such objects are highly prized and valued. The ‘mana’ is embodied in the object, and once they are passed on, that special energy is perceived and valued by the subsequent owners. I can understand this numinous like feeling embodied in beautifully crafted objects. Perhaps they can pass on something of the spirit of the maker? I like to think so.

Have a safe, creative, fertile, prosperous and rewarding New Year!

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever perfect and nothing lasts.

First Tomato of the Season

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We have picked the first red tomato of the summer, well before Xmas. Always an achievement, but not so special these recent years, as with accelerating global heating, we are so much hotter and everything in the garden is ripening earlier.

When we moved here to the highlands in 1976, we couldn’t get a ripe berry off our newly planted berry canes until January. These days the berry crop is all over and gone well before Xmas.

We are harvesting peaches, apricots, the last of the late sour cherries, as well as strawberries and blueberries. We don’t make any pots over December and January, as we are full time involved in managing the fruit from the orchards and the summer flush of vegetables.

The zucchinis are going mad, so we are having a few meals of stuffed zucchini flowers. It’s a lovely summer time light meal. It achieves 2 important outcomes, by picking the flowers off the plant with the nascent fruit attached behind, it makes a colourful and delicious meal, but it also takes the fruit off so early that they don’t get a chance to explode into marrows if you just glance away for a moment or loose concentration, zucchinis fill out so very fast!  Managing zucchinis means defusing them every morning early before they expand like The Big Bang!

The heat also means fruit fly problems, we get in early in October/November with ‘DAK’ pots, male fruit fly lures, and protein lures for the female flys. I also spray a ‘spinetoram’ soil bacteria and dipel bacteria for the codling moths. I also place codling moth lures in half a dozen of the various trees that are susceptible to codling moth, like apples, pears and quinces. Everything we do is approved for organic gardening. Still, with all this effort, we still get fruit fly strike. It’s important to pick the fruit early and cook it to preserve it either in the freezer or in ‘Vacola’ vacuum jars, and stored for later in the year.

Last weekend I ran a couple of pottery ’tool-making’ workshops. I take small groups of 5 or 6 potters through the steps in making their own tools specific to their particular needs and preferences. There are at least a dozen specific tools that anyone could choose to make but to be realistic, a novice tool maker can only realistically achieve 3 or 4 really nice and well crafted tools in a day, so you have to chose what is most appealing and useful ti you. I don’t expect everyone to finish every tool on the day, but if all the roughing out is done and only the fine finishing is left to do. It’s best to take it home and do all that time consuming fine sanding and oiling at a later time. Best to make use of my skills and my workshop equipment to get as much done here as is realistically achievable in the time.

Making your own tools gives you 2 important outcomes, firstly the tool will be exactly what you want and need, unlike some of the rubbish that is sold in the ‘basic’ pottery tool set sold in the cheap shops. The only good item in that plastic bag is the sponge! the rest all need work. The best thing to do with badly designed tools is to cut them up or down to make them more appropriate. Don’t be afraid, just cut it, grind it, file it or whatever until it does the job that you want. If you can’t make it work for you, just put it away and make a good one from scratch. 

This is the 2nd important outcome. It gives you the skills and insight to design and make the exact tool for you for that particular job. If it doesn’t work, then you know how to re-shape it until it does work how you want. Just because you bought it – possibly at great expense – from a reputable craft shop, doesn’t mean that it will be the best shape for you. If it doesn’t work, don’t hesitate. Don’t waste time struggling with it. Take the initiative, cut it up or grind some off it, or possibly just put it in the ‘Down-To-Experience-Bucket’ and make a proper one. 

There is also a 3rd benefit. Making your own tools can be virtually free by recycling scrap material. There is a huge sense of satisfaction in sitting back and admiring a beautifully crafted tool that you made yourself from a branch off a fruit tree growing in your garden. Home grown organic tools. AND, so rewarding and satisfying. Making your own things feeds your soul. Re-use, re-purpose, re-cycle.

I made a stir fry of garden veggies and tofu for dinner to feed my soul and my belly.

Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished and nothing lasts.

The Last Days of Spring

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It’s the last days of spring, and I have been very busy doing all sorts of little jobs that have been waiting for me to find some ‘spare’ time. We were so flat out busy working in the pottery leading up to the open Studios weekends. Now it’s time for other things.

Although it’s still spring, it seems like summer has been with us here in Balmoral Village for the past 6 weeks and more. The lush green spring growth is long gone. It’s been hot and dry, interspersed with cold, blustery, windy days. The net effect has been to dry everything out. The paddocks and lawn around the house have browned off. The soil in the vegetable garden has dried out to the point of shrinking, and starting to crack open in the places where we are not watering the nascent, emerging seedlings, destined to become our summer food source. We keep the soil moist around the seedlings and let the other areas stay dry – until I need that spot to plant more vegetables.

We have spent years nurturing the local soil here. Improving it with multiple applications of compost and manure, interspersed with additions of lime and dolomite. Over the decades, the depth of the fertile, friable topsoil has increased to over 300 mm.possibly more in places. I never seem to hit the hard iron stone and sandy loam layer anymore. The worms take the organic matter down deep and mix it well. I just keep adding compost to the top as a fertilising mulch. 

It was a real shock and learning experience to discover how effective worms are at disseminating organic matter down through soil to amazing depths, given time and repeated applications of organic matter/compost. After the bad fires here in 2019, our orchard trees got very badly burnt, so I decided to move the orchard up closer to the street and to build the new pottery on the old orchard site. When we started to dig out the stumps of the 45 year old fruit trees, I was amazed that the rick chocolate brown top soil when down half a metre or more. When I planted those trees in 1976, the holes I dug for each tree were dug through hard yellow stoney loam. What a change in the soil profile over those years. Thank you worms.

The zucchinis are starting to produce well now. They come on quite fast from seedlings to fruiting in a few weeks in this warm weather. I have been picking them small with the flower still on and stuffing the flowers with cottage cheese and herbs for a light fun dinner.

We also have plenty of silver beet/chard at the moment, although it is starting to bolt with the longer days. I have planted more seeds for a follow-on crop. I have been making spanakopita-like spinach and cheese triangles, or spanapotterka as I like to call them, or sometimes whole pies with a similar filling. It’s a great way to use up our excess of leafy greens, as they bolt away in the heat, and maximise our return from them before they are all gone. but it does need the ricotta, fetta, blue cheese and herbs mix to make it special. Plus a light touch of chilli.

I have also been making a few fruit tarts as well. Something for a more relaxed and comforting morning tea. Since the Open Studio sales are over and the 50% off Xmas sale hasn’t happened yet. Not until the 14th of December. The pottery is all cleaned out and set up for sales, I don’t want to mess it all up making more pots just now, as we still have plenty of stock. So I have time in the garden and kitchen catch up and do a lot of things that I like to do, but haven’t had the time to fit in, until now. 

We have picked the last of the artichokes and cauliflowers. I made a vegetable pasta with the artichoke hearts and as the cauliflower was so far gone. I mashed it up and used it as vegetable filling to bulk out the sauce with last summer’s tomato passata.

This week we picked the last of the cherries and the first of the apricots.

I like working in the garden, especially in the warmth of the season, before it gets too hot. Everything responds so well and so fast at this time of year. There is always some fragrance in the air and birdsong on the wind, often fighting over the last of the high fruit in the mulberry tree or some other treasured and favoured food source. They squabble and chatter and squark and carry on, endless entertainment.

While in the garden, I noticed that one of the ancient wooden barrels that I bought 3rd, or even 4th hand, some 30 years ago, have finally rotted away to the point of collapsing. The staves have rotted away from the inside with the constant wetting and drying as we water the blueberries that we are growing in them.

I hate to see waste, so I made one of the rotted staves into a textured pottery tool. A paddle for creating texture while changing the shape of a larger pot. I’m teaching a weekend workshop of tool making next weekend, so this can be one of the projects. i have lots of these old textured staves now. I had to shape and add and new wooden baton, to reinforced and strengthen the handle. A rewarding project that avoids waste and recycles some old timber into something useful and precious. I love the natural, organic texture of the old weathered wood.

Once that was done I set to and cut, folded and rolled a new galvanised steel sheet ring to slide over the old soil base to keep the bush alive. I slipped the ring up and over the bush, down around the soil base. I made the new ring to be just 50mm larger in diameter to make the job easy. It fitted perfectly! I filled the small gap around the edge with some light soil and compost mix, eventually watering it all in to settle it down. It cost me about $30 to make this new steel pot, and it was quick and easy, as I didn’t need to move the plant and all its soil. A new 1/2 wine barrel would cost a couple of hundred dollars these days. So out of our budget range. $30 seems cheap to me for a 750mm dia garden pot, 400 mm high.

This new steel pot isn’t as beautiful, rustic and weathered as the old wooden barrels. The wood has a certain ‘natural’ beauty that I love, but I ask myself. “Are they 6 times better?” Possibly? But then I think of trying to lift the 100kgs of soil and root ball up and into a new wooden pot. I couldn’t do it anymore. So I’m playing it safe. I’m happy with the new pot.

Of course work in the pottery is never completely over. We have a summer school and other throwing weekend workshops booked in for the new year, so It’s time to make more clay body to get it all laid down and ageing, ready for when it’s needed in the new year. Our pottery workshop is laid out in such a way that the creative side is quite seperate from the more dusty, noisey, messy side of the business where we crush and grind all our glaze materials and make our clay bodies.

Janine and I have processed over a tonne of clay this year through our equipment. Each batch that we make is unique. As we do everything ourselves, we can make each batch of clay slightly different in order to closely match the type of projects that we are planning to make. This latest batch is slightly coarser in texture to facilitate making larger forms. The added grit helps the clay to stand up better in larger forms. We also make fine stoneware as well as porcelain.

After all the clay is processed, pugged twice and then bagged and put to bed, everything is scrubbed down and the floor is mopped. 

I like to keep the workshop as dust free as is possible. After a change of water and a 2nd mopping, the big roller doors at each end of the workshop are opened up and the breeze flows through and drys the floor. 

We are good now for the next 3 months. We are very lucky to have such good equipment that allows us to make large amounts of clay like this in a couple of days. All this gear is very old and has had a difficult history. But I manage to keep it all going, maintaining it as best as I can, cobbling together disparate parts and spares from here and there and making up special bits where they aren’t available any more. Its a challenge, and rewarding when it all works.

Nothing is even finished, nothing is ever perfect,  and nothing lasts.

New pots for the Open Studio, Arts Trail

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The pottery and its garden are looking great just now and for the next few weeks. All the spring flowers are coming out, just in time for the Open Studio weekends.

We are firing both electric kilns every day for the past week. We are getting all of the final glaze firings done. Working like a well oiled machine. We have been so lucky, that the sun has been shining bright every day – until today. It’s overcast with just a few spots of drizzly rain now and then. Just enough to stop me wanting to go out and do some gardening. I have two more firings on. One stoneware and one gold lustre firing. It’s all coming together.

We have managed to do all our firings on sunshine up until this afternoon, when it had turned quite overcast. Not only have we managed to glaze everything with our own electricity, but I have been careful to manage it so that I have kept both electric cars fully charged, at the same time and still been able to sell just a little of our occasional excess back to the grid to cover our daily access charges. It’s important to me to live a green, low carbon, passive, low energy, non polluting, life of minimal consumption, and we are doing it. We are managing it pretty well. But this afternoon, I will be withdrawing some expensive ‘green’ sustainable energy from the grid, for the last 3 hours of these current firings.

I have been experimenting with some new coloured pastel slips that I developed before we went to WA for the conference. See my previous post;  More rain and tasting cider, Posted on 

I weighed out almost 300 different pastel tones of stoneware slips. 

Using these colours, I tried making some new square plates, with a Korean inspired ‘Bojagi’ traditional fabric design. I’m very pleased with them, for a first attempt. I quite like the one were I ‘channel’ Piet Mondrian. Mondrianic bojagi!

I have also been making some more Korean inspired ‘Moon Jars’, but with an Australian twist. No photos yet, that are still in the kilns.

Please call in to see us on the next two weekends 1st/2nd and the 8th/9th of November. We will have tea or coffee and even cake for the first in and best fed.

In the kitchen, I’ve been harvesting lots of leaks, and making chicken and leak pie. I’ve got quite quick at knocking up small batches of wholemeal pastry for pie crusts and pizza bases.

We may be very busy in the pottery, but there is always time to raid the garden for food for dinner and to cook up something wholesome and delicious for dinner.

Southern Highlands Arts Trail, 2025

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The Southern Highlands Arts Trail for 2025 kicks off in just 3 weeks. We will be open on the first two weekends in November 1st & 2nd, then the 8th & 9th of November.

We will be open all days from 10 til 4pm, but are happy to open on any day during the 2 week period if you let us know that you are coming. We live here. We’ll be here every day working in the pottery or gardens.

We are recently returned from Western Australia, where we were taking part in the Australian Ceramics Triennial. I was there to present a paper on how to reduce carbon pollution from our (potters) kiln chimneys. I’ve spent a couple of years researching, building and testing a scrubber for the top of my kiln chimney, to minimise the release of PM2.5 carbon particles, that are a result of the combustion of carbon fuels.

We decided that if we were to travel so far for this event, then apart from purchasing carbon credit off-sets for the flights, we should make the most of our time away and go down to Margaret River and have a look around, and possibly taste some wines. So we did.

I discovered the best chardonnay that I have ever tasted in my life. The Chardonnay from ‘Pierro’ vineyard in Margret River. Really deep, dry, rich, fragrant, and lasting flavour. Only a slight hint of sweetness. Highly recommended for a tasting if you are ever down there. $117 per bottle, but even $5 just to taste it! A once in a life time experience. 

I’m perfectly ready to accept that there are better chardonnays out there. I see them for sale in posh catalogues, costing even more, but I’ll never know, as I never buy wines anywhere near $100 per bottle – til now. I really enjoyed it. But that was it. Never again. As I said. A once in a lifetime experience. So glad that I called in. I’d never heard of them previously. A small producer, unirrigated, crop-thinned, hand picked, wild yeast, a year in small French oak sitting on lees. Perfect!

My favourite chardonnay up until now, and will continue to be, into the future, is Bowen Estate Chardonnay from the Coonawarra. Beautifully dry, well balanced, classic chardonnay fragrance, lingering finish, and a lot more approachable and affordable at $25. But still kept only for special meals and occasions.

While there we watched the sun set over the ocean in the West. Saw lots of wild flowers and visited two excellent museums. It was a full trip.

At the conference, we saw and heard a lot of presentations and demonstrations. A few duds, some really excellent. Something for everyone and every taste and interest. In fact, so much going on that it was impossible to see and hear everything, as there was always too much to choose from and some programming conflicts of my choices, meant that I missed a few things while watching others. Not a bad thing.

I really enjoyed watching, Ruth Ju-Shih Li, intermittently, over 3 days, create an amazing porcelain hand built sculpture as a performance and then dissolve it back into sludge with water.

I had to think long and hard before I decided to commit the crime of flying to the other side of Australia. Such a lot of carbon debt! I did however choose to buy carbon off-set credits to make some gesture towards minimising the damage. I support ‘Green Fleet’ for this purpose. I’m not advocating or recommending this organisation. This is not an advert. I don’t do that. But if you are unfamiliar with the concept of purchasing carbon credits to off-set some of your personal global warming damage. Maybe you could do an internet search and see what is involved.

In the end I did decide to go to Fremantle, as I was offered the chance to speak about my research on minimising the PM 2.5 carbon particulates from kiln chimneys. Something no one else is prosecuting at the current time. It doesn’t appear on anybody’s radar currently, but there is a mass of information to be found if you look. Most of it quite disturbing. In some ways, presenting this lecture is in itself an act of promoting carbon minimisation. I also offered to present a second paper to the conference on the use of solar power with battery back-up as a low carbon means of firing ceramics, but it was politely declined. No real interest within the committee it seems.

Oh Boy! I read in the news today… (Thank you John Lennon.) About the current average cost to each household in Australia for their energy bill. It currently stands at $5,800 pa. Janine and I have made an effort to minimise our energy bills. Particularly our carbon related energy consumption. We run a low energy household, and have had solar power installed since 2007. We haven’t paid an electricity bill since then. Since the big fire in 2019, everything that we had to replace was carefully considered and was always electric. So now we only spend $400 a year to put petrol in our plug-in hybrid car, and $150 a year to buy petrol for the mower, chainsaws and fire fighting pumps. Thats just 10% of the national average. I’m proud of that. 

In Fremantle, we stayed with someone who told me that when his two daughters were still at home, he was paying $350 per day for electricity! there was a swimming pool involved I understand.

When we put solar on our roof, we essentially paid our lifetime electricity bills all at once in advance. We didn’t choose to do it to save money. We were very concerned about the future with global heating and the next few generations. As it turned out, we have saved a small fortune, going on current national average power bills..

I recently saw in a supermarket advertising magazine/brochure, that you can now buy a 10 kW battery and 6.5 kW of Solar PV for $7,000. Or even better, 20kw battery with 6.5kw of PV for $8500.

That is so incredibly cheap! 

Caution! if something is too good to be true…..

But certainly worth looking into. Please exercise due diligence. 

I am not recommending this product. I have no allegiance to this supermarket and I am not in receipt of any payment or commission for mentioning it. I don’t do that. I just think that it might be worth a very severe, and deep investigation, because it just might be OK. 

Don’t waste your money. Ask around, search out reviews and customer experiences. get yourself informed. I’m a bit sceptical about the price. However, it just might be a good deal?

Back home our garden is flourishing, as our lovely neighbour Tina has been watering things on the hot and dry windy days. So many plants have burst into flower in our absence, as they were just buds when we left.

The veggie garden is still very productive. Fish and parsnip chips with a Japanese inspired cabbage salad. Oka-nomiyaki, an Australian version of Japanese cabbage pancake. Baked mixed vegetables etc.

Pug mills and working with soft clay

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Warning! This post might be very boring! 

Don’t read on unless you want to learn something about clay.

Janine and I have been teaching weekend workshops these last couple of weeks, and all of the preparation that goes into that to make sure that everything runs smoothly keeps us very busy. The whole exercise takes us 5 weeks in total. However, there is still time for other fun things like the garden, chickens and cooking

Over the week in between the two weekend workshops, I re-cycled all the clay from failed and re-cycled practice pieces that had made their way into the clay room to be stiffened up in the plaster basins. I have 5 large plaster tubs sitting in the direct light of the North facing window, this keeps them dry and ready for use, most of the time. Plaster saturates quite quickly if thin slip is poured into them, but they cope very well with soft plastic slumped pots that just need stiffening up. 20 mins on each side on a dry plaster batt, is all they need and it’s well and truely ready to wedge up and use again.

At the end of the workshop, I get everyone to collect all the trimmings, turnings, scraped-off batt bases and thick slurry from their throwing water tub, and pour it all into a tall 20 litre bucket. 8 potters can fill it up pretty quickly. I let it sit and soak for a day or two, to make sure everything is equally softened, I like to get it to a thick and creamy consistency, not unlike Greek yoghurt – with some lumps.

I then transfer it all onto the plaster drying tubs. It takes 3 days to get stiff enough to lift it out and stand it up. This allows more air to circulate around the soft, barely plastic clay, so as to dry it out faster. The plaster basins then need a few days in the sun to dry out again. When we do back to back weekend workshops, the plaster does get saturated and ‘tired’! However, it always recovers with a few days of sunshine.

Once stiff enough, I put it back through the pug mill, extrude it and bag it ready for re-use. It’s easy mindless work. However, I say that in the full knowledge that it is only so if you already know exactly what you are doing and have done a lot of it before. There are so many little signs and issues that you need to know and be aware of to understand about pug mills and recycling clay. The joys and sorrows of owning a pug mill!

The clay can’t be either too soft or too hard, or the mechanism of the pug mill won’t work. A pug mill is in essence, a long tube with an Archimedes spiral inside. This spiral blade pushes the clay through the barrel. Some parts of the spiral at the beginning are removed to make the spiral into a series of spiralled chopping blades. This chops up the clay, mixing both hard and soft parts evenly, then the later, complete spiral section of the auger pushes and compresses the clay out the other end. Some of the better pug mills have a screen or screens half way along the barrel so that the clay is pushed through the mesh and comes out the other side as clay spaghetti. This exposes any trapped air bubbles which are then sucked out of the pug mill barrel by a vacuum pump, before the clay is recompressed and continues along the barrel.

There can’t be any little bone dry edges that have dried out too far. They are rock hard and dry and will clog up the vacuum screens. I have to constantly check when running my fingers through the thick slurry, that there are no small tools, profiles, kidney shapes, or chamois strips left behind by my students. Any of these will grind the exercise to a rapid halt. Requiring the pug mill to be stripped down, dismantled, cleaned, the offending ‘rubbish’ removed, then checked and rebuilt. It’s the best part of a full days job to to a thorough clean out. If it’s only a chamois, sometimes, I can get away with just removing the blocked vacuum screens, cleaning them only and reassembling.  This is still a good hour or so.

In the picture above, the orange vertical plate on the side of the blue pug mill barrel, half way along the barrel is where the vacuum screens are located and can be removed for cleaning. The white lid on top of the barrel is where the vacuum chamber sucks out the air. The vacuum pump is located in a box slung underneath the pug mill trolley, which is on castors for easy manoeuvring. 

So far, I’ve been very diligent in checking all the recycled clay pretty thoroughly, so I haven’t had any ‘accidental’ issues in the last few years. I did discover, quite early on that the new pottery shed, with its north orientated, solar passive design, does get a lot of direct sunlight in onto the clay processing area in mid winter. I’ve learn’t from hard experience that direct sunlight like this can cause the pug mill barrel to heat up and sweat moisture out of the clay on one side, which then condenses and trickles down to the bottom of the barrel. The end result is dry hard clay in one part and slurry in another. The dry, very stiff nuggets of hard clay get forced onto the fine mesh of the vacuum screens and clog it up. The rheological nature of the thin wet slurry in the other part of the barrel doesn’t have the cohesive strength to force the hard clay through. A complete strip down is required. This is a lesson that I learnt the hard way.

Rheology is a very interesting subject in itself. Clay can be either too soft or too hard to stick together and be ‘worked’ or shaped successfully. There are limits called ‘Atterberg’ limits that have been determined, which predict the upper and lower limits of water content in clay. If too wet, it just sloshes around and won’t hold a shape, when too dry, it is just crumbly granules. We need the ‘Goldie Locks’ range for our clays to ‘work’ successfully. For pressure extruding the range is somewhere between 17% and 60%,. That’s such a huge range. See graph. For pugging, it needs to be in a narrower range of 20% to 30%. depending on the inherent plasticity and texture of the clay body. For throwing clay on the potters wheel, it is often closer to 20 to 22%. I have found in practice over the decades that my wrists have their own personal Atterberg limit of around 25% water content or even a little bit softer rather than stiffer. 

Some people say that you should work to your strengths. I think the opposite, I work to my weakest point, and as that is my ancient wrists. I have adjusted my clay body recipes over time to include more very fine plastic particles, slightly more course non-plastics and more fine sand. This combination allows me to make softer clay mixtures that are still easy to pug and easy to throw on the wheel when very soft.  I am limited by what is still available on the market here. So many materials that we used to be able to get have been removed from the market, as the Australian companies that own clay mines were purchased by multinational players who shut them down to force us to buy their imported products.

Luckily, I was trained in the 60’s and 70’s when clay technology was still taught in Art School. I even went on to teach it myself for a few decades. So, I can develop and test my own clay body recipes. A skill soon to be completely lost, as us oldies retire and die out. I can still obtain Australian mined and milled ceramic materials from NSW, Vic and Qld, but the options are constantly diminishing. When I have been shown commercial plastic clay bodies over the years, I have always found them to be far too stiff for my wrists to feel comfortable with. Possibly because of a lifetime of damage due to hard work with my arms, wrists and hands?

So dry lumps of clay on the pug mill screens stops everything in it’s tracks, until the screens are removed and cleaned, and this can be a big job, depending on the maker and model of the pug mill. We are lucky here in Australia to have the ‘Venco’ company, who under the direction and vision of Geoff Hill, manufactured pottery equipment here since the 70’s. His version of  ‘Harry Davis’s, genius design’ of vacuum pug mill was an excellent piece of machinery. The smaller, cheaper, models require that the entire machine be diss-assembled to get to the singular screen. However, the larger, and more expensive models are designed so that the screens are accessible from the outside of the barrel and can be accessed directly for cleaning.

So now I have learnt to keep my pug mills covered with silver insulation foil when not in use, and this has solved the condensation problem. There is always something new to learn, even after 50 years!

Once pugged and bagged, It’s not the end. Good clay that has been well made needs to be nurtured a little. Clay is alive, in the sense that it contains live microbes, or should if you want it to develop the best possible plasticity. We live in the bush here in Balmoral Village. There are few Government services. There is no Town Water Supply available. So we have to collect rain water in dams and water tanks. Water stored in the ground has more bacteria live organisms than Chlorinated and sterilised city water. My clean rain water will allow the naturally present bacteria and other organisms to grow and develop in the clay. This might sound shocking, but it is just natural. Clay ‘ages’ as the organic action develops between the clay mineral particles. The water is drawn closer to the surface of the fragments and the air is slowly excluded and passed to the surface by capillary attraction. In this slow gentle way, clay develops its full plasticity. It is very noticeable after say 3 months. But a year is better! Of course, no-one in their right mind would make clay and then not use it for 3 months! Would they??? Yes muggins does. I have stored and aged porcelain bodies up to 15 years.

There is a distinct difference in the clay after a period of ageing. Clay body made with chlorinated water inhibits the natural growth and ageing, so does not develop the same plasticity.

In the old pottery, there were a lot of eucalypts growing around the building, and consequently there were a lot of gum leaves in the rain water. These made the water a little acid with their tannin. It turns out that tannic water is just about the very best additive that you can put into clay to improve its plasticity. Our gum leaf infused tannic rain water was a pale, transparent grey/brown colour. Some fancy companies that manufacture commercial Porcelain bodies, buy in, at great expense, a product called ’Totannin’, that does much the same thing. Our clay really responds to any time left wrapped in plastic bags, sometimes double bagged, for long term storage. Then stored in a cool dark place and not touched for as long as you can bear it.

Each Friday evening, before the workshops, I bake a loaf of bread and a tart. This time, its beetroot and French goats cheese over a bed of slow cooked onion jam. This has always proved to be a very popular lunch contribution at the workshops. Every one brings something to share for lunch. There is always just a bit more than we need. Everyone eats well and the selection is broad, varied and delicious.

We spent the first day on the wheel, throwing all the forms that we will work with on the following day. I demonstrate each step in the process on each day. 

Teaching a throwing school in winter is always just a little bit of a challenge. The pots don’t want to dry out over night to stiffen up to the point where they can be turned, trimmed, manipulated and handled with ease.. I get the pots to dry faster, by stoking up the slow combustion stove to the max, and keep it going well into the night, to ensure that the pots evaporate off enough of their moisture to be workable. It’s a juggling act, but I manage to muddle through, and at the end of the weekend, everybody gets to take home their finished works.

In the orchard, the early peaches and nectarines are flowering. There is only 3 more weeks to spring, and lots of plants are starting to come back to life, buds are swelling and even the lawn is starting to grown again. This last part isn’t so thrilling though, as this means a few hours of lawn mowing several times a week.

Spring blossom always offers up so much positive energy, the a promise of warmer weather and a bountiful harvest to come.

Nothing is ever finished, Nothing is ever perfect and nothing lasts.

Enjoy the moment.