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

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.

Low temp wood-fire w/shop

Posted on 04/07/2016 by hotnsticky

We are all prepared for the first of our winter wood firing workshops. The early morning sun shines obliquely across the site. Everything is ready. We have spent the weeks beforehand preparing the wood, the kilns and the glazes.

Yesterday, we had our friend Susan down here for some last minute help with prep. While I was handing out HTV cards for The Greens and the local polling booth. Janine and Susan had their own test firing of their own work. A bit of quiet time to have some fun together, but also a chance to test all the new glaze batches to make sure that everything will run as smoothly as possible on the day.

The day goes smoothly, A credit to Janine and Susan, for all the hard work and preparation that they have put in. Everyone seems happy and they are kept busy with glazing and firing all day. The kilns perform well and work starts to accumulate in the saw dust trench.

The firings proceed all throughout the day, as once the kilns are hot. They can be unloaded, reloaded and re-fired easily all day.

Glazing, firing, unloading and reloading, smoking and more glazing and refiring. It’s a busy day.

The day ends with a lot of happy potters going home with boxes of glazed pots. We clean up and put everything away again. I go to the garden and pick arms full of veggies. This will be our dinner tonight. Baked vegetables with a small piece of steamed fish.

We light the fires and settle down in front of the idiot box with a glass of red wine to hear some analysis of the election turmoil.

Interesting times!

The simple pleasure of a dull job

Posted on 16/06/2016 by hotnsticky

It’s that time of year again. I need to make some more wadding for packing the kilns. Making wadding isn’t fun. It isn’t even interesting really. If truth be told, it’s a rather dull job. It just has to be done. So, to make it as bearable as possible, I make it up in a monster size batch, so that the pain is all in one go and then there is the relief of knowing that it won’t need to be done again for another year.

Wadding is used to seperate the pots from the kiln shelves and the kiln props from the kiln shelves. It has to be refractory and remain crumbly and friable after being fired to stoneware temperatures, so that it can be removed easily, even allowing for the deposition of the fluxing effect of wood ash during the firing.

I make it up in big batches of 120 to 150 kilos. Every wood-firer has their own ‘secret’ recipe. I don’t have any secrets. They’re all up here on this blog. Some potters use various mixtures of silica and clay, but I don’t want to use fine silica dust anywhere if I can help it, because of the risks of silicosis. Others use alumina powder and clay, which is very refractory, but expensive and in my opinion it is overkill. There is too much of an embedded energy debt tied up in aluminium and alumina processing. It takes massive quantities of electricity to extract aluminium from bauxite, most of which comes from burning coal, so it is rather unethical to use alumina powder, unless it is absolutely necessary. We use a small amount in shelf wash, but it amounts to just a kilo a year. I can live with that. The other thing that I really dislike about alumina in wadding is that unless you are particularly careful, you end up putting stark white finger prints on the pots that are being packed after handling the wadding. You really have to wash your hands after every time you touch the stuff.

I have decided to make this batch of wadding out of ‘fat’ sand. Fat sand is also called ‘bush sand’, ‘brickies sand’ or ‘bush loam’. It’s a coarse quartz sand with a fair amount of clay in it. It also contains some limonite or hydrated iron oxide, so it looks a bit yellowish. I mix this with some powdered kaolin. This is a great use for powdered kaolin. I don’t use a lot of it, but is is very useful for this purpose. I mix it in the ratio of one 25kg bag of kaolin to 4.5 buckets of damp washed sand and one bucket of water. When I can get clean saw dust I also add two buckets of saw dust, but this is getting harder to find these days. The last time I visited the local timber yard, they had been cutting some synthetic wood products that were a rich canary yellow. This stuff looked like it was loaded with resin glue. I thought that it might be particularly toxic if it were burnt in the kiln as wadding. So I didn’t collect any. So, this batch of wadding is just going to be sand and clay.

Adding saw dust is great for wadding that use on new pots that are once fired, as it can leave an interesting charcoal grey to black shadow mark. It doesn’t work on bisque, only once fired work.

When it is freshly made wadding like this is rather short or non-plastic, being so sandy, but after ageing for a few months it develops quite good plasticity and after a year or so, the last few bags are plastic enough to throw with. Not that you would want to, but I think that it might be possible. I’m down to my last bag of the old batch now and it is very easily worked into coils and small balls. This new batch will have a month or two before I need to use it.

I make it up in a couple of batches in the dough mixer and then bag it up into 15 kg packs and store it away.

Security is a years supply of wadding. Now, when I look down on my stash of wadding I get the simple pleasure of knowing that I won’t have to do this job again for another 12 months. It’s a nice feeling!

fond regards from the well wadded potter.

The Last Beta Firing? Success at iteration 7

Posted on 09/04/2016 by hotnsticky

Janine has just completed the 7th firing and design iteration of the little wood fired kiln. It worked well and there are now no more obvious and glaring changes that need to be made to the design. Of course there are a lot of little issues that will need to be tweaked over the coming months. But I can’t see anything that will require a major rebuild. I think that this design as it stands now is a good one. – Until I think of something better!

The verandah of the pottery now has a collection of these little prototypes all parked there out of the weather. They all work well enough at lower temps, so I will use them for our raku firing weekend workshops. The image shows a very full wheel barrow of wood, enough for two or more firings to stoneware.

The design that I have ended up with is now ready for a limited production run.

This last firing of Janine’s was more or less perfect. Except that we managed to crack a kiln shelf. Janine had a lot of flat ware, so I retrieved a kiln shelf from the rack that hadn’t been fired for over 20 years. I think that the shock of a fast firing and possibly moisture absorbtion that couldn’t escape fast enough was the problem, as this hasn’t happened before. I would usually like to season a new kiln shelf more gentle. Perhaps by rubbing in salt and pepper with a little olive oil might work next time?:) By lunch time we’re famished. Because I managed to catch up with the fresh fish man, we have ultra-fresh sashimi grade tuna. So its sashimi for lunch.

I also make fresh pippies in white wine, chilli and saffron sauce for dinner. What more could you want to celebrate a successful firing day. Followed by a fresh salad from the garden. We have a local grower of saffron now, so we support them.

I have been making a new batch of spy holes for my kiln factory. I throw them on the wheel, very slowly, out of a very coarse mix of crushed high alumina grog and a small amount of kaolin to bind it. The mix is so aggressive that my hands are starting to hurt after just one pot-board full. This mix really takes your skin off. But that’s OK. 20 or so will last me for another year. If I wanted to make any more I’d have to wear gloves. I’ve heard some potters claim that they throw till their fingers bleed, but I’m not that stupid. I know when to stop.

I fire the spy holes in the little wood kiln. This little wonder fires cone 8 on the bottom shelf, cone 9 in the middle and cone 10 at the top. A perfectly useable working stoneware temperature range. Certainly OK for a 3 to 3 1/2 hour firing schedule. My bowls turn out well too. Some nice, soft, pastel glazes.

I’m really pleased that everything has come to a clear resolution at this time. As for the next couple of months. I’m fully booked on other projects and I wont have any time to play with this little kiln for a while. In the evening we de-seed chillies for drying in the kitchen window, along with beans and corn, destined for drying and grinding for polenta. I also finish drying some tomatoes in the oven. Once dried in this way they have the potential to keep almost indefinitely, but they never do. They are so yummy that I eat them like lollies. They never last the year. It’s great to add a handful into winter stocks. They add that certain piquant, sharp sweetness to sauces or a ragu.

This is just another day in the mixed household of self-reliance.

Best wishes from Mr. Beta and Ms Better

Small portable stoneware wood fired kiln. cont.

Posted on 06/04/2016 by hotnsticky

We have just fired the 5th incarnation of our little, portable, stoneware capable, wood fired kiln. It fired very well, again easily in 3 hours. It just cruises along at its own pace. 1 hr to 1000 oC and then 2 hrs to 2 1/2 hrs in reduction to stoneware cone 10 over.

This variation was to test out the new chimney arrangement and that worked perfectly, some much better than the previous one. I am very happy with that. Another problem solved!

The hard-working firing team, going at it flat out. Half way through the wood stack in the barrow. Going for the big final effort, no holes barred! Go for it ladies!

I have it adjusted now so that as the temperature reaches 1000 oC. The kiln automatically goes into reduction. I don’t have to use a damper to make this happen. The kiln continues to rise steadily over the next two hours without having to alter any settings in the firebox. It’s lovely.

However, I notice slight difference in the fired surfaces around the setting, so I conceive of another experiment to try and even out this anomaly. I have everything that I need in stock in the spare parts shelf in the pottery, so no need to go out and buy anything. I spend the morning cutting, grinding and painting all the new bits and the kiln is primed and ready to fire again. I need to glaze some more work for this firing, so there will be a days delay while they dry out. This will be variation/refinement firing number 6.

I’ve learnt from bitter experience that if I fire fast with freshly applied glazes. I can blow them off the pot on the underneath side. All my bodies and glazes are currently made here onsite from locally collected and processed rocks, shales and ashes. Everything is made onsite and it takes a month of Sundays to get it all organised, dried, crushed and milled and then bagged ready for inclusion in the glazes. These are weighed out and then sometimes re-milled. and at other times, just passed through a very fine sieve to extract any small detritus that was caught in a gap around the lid of the ball mill and didn’t get fully ground. Glazes with no clay in them are notoriously delicate and friable to handle once dry and very prone to just falling off from the underneath side of pots. Of course i use a little bentonite to help stabilise them and shrink them on as well as creating a little bit of dry strength, but I have found that I can only add 1 or 2 % before it starts to change some of the glazes.

Tragically, as always seems to happen. I found yet one more issue with this configuration that needs a little more thought. During this last firing, I notice that I could improve the kiln shelf and stainless steel grating arrangement. So it’s back to the drawing board, or in this case, the work bench and I make a new set of one-piece ceramic supports that I hope will work a lot better. I pull the kiln to pieces and start again from scratch, right back to floor level and create a new setting design.

Maybe this will be the last of the beta firings?

We will fire again today with a load of Janine’s work in it this time. As she has a load glazed and dried ready to go.

Always so much more to learn.

Another Post From The Running Postman

Posted on 26/02/2016 by hotnsticky

The wild flowers have been lovely, but they are all gone now. It’s almost autumn and the cherry trees in the Chekov orchard are loosing their leaves. They are the first to fruit and the first to go dormant. We are experiencing a late summer scorching week of high temperatures in the mid 30’s and have had to be out early and late to water the garden. Overall, this summer has been exceptional, although it has been hot, it has also rained a lot and even at this late stage , with all this heat now, we still have green grass outside our window. We are usually looking out at dry, dusty gravel at this stage of the summer.

I have delivered the latest kiln to my customer and all went so very smoothly. Just as it should, as we do a planning to get it all just right, but regular readers of this blog will know that the best laid plans can suddenly go terribly wrong at the drop of a hat when a third party lets you down after promising faithfully to turn up on time. This is never the case with Dave, my local crane truck driver. He is amazingly punctual and careful with my jobs. It’s a pleasure to work with someone so professional and creatively competent at moving heavy objects.

Warren and I have already started the next job and got it well under way. As I am ahead of schedule with my orders, I have been able to spend time in the pottery making some more of my porcelain. Iron stained yellow, pale ochre grey and creamy grey/white bodies.

We have also now completed 5 firings in our little new experimental, portable wood fired kiln. It gets better every time we fire it. That is to say we are getting better at understanding it and how it works. I’m also finding out all it’s weak points. All the things that I didn’t expect or imagine might happen have shown them selves and come to pass, so each time we fire, we find a new problem that needs a better solution. I solve each one as it appears and then onto the next. I think that I have it all solved, then something else appears. I’m constantly thinking this next firing will see it all solved and then I can start to produce them. Always the optimist:)

Cast iron doesn’t work in this kiln. OK for raku, but not here.

We have tried experiments with different types of fire bars over time and worked out that in this kiln, we can’t use ceramic fire-bars, or mild steel fire-bars, or cast iron bars, but custom welded stainless steel fire bars are the go for this little beauty when fired in reduction. The other fire bars that we have tried have worked well in other kilns at different times, but for this one, it’s going to have to be custom made stainless steel. They have proved to also have their issues, but I have worked thorough these and I now have a workable solution. I just need to try one more variation on the way we use the flue!

I am so confident about this little kiln now, that I am starting to draw up a plan for a larger version. Increasing the kiln shelf area from 300mm. x 455mm. (12’ x 18”) to a kiln shelf of 455mm x 455mm. Sq. (18” x 18”)!

For the last few weeks, the hazelnuts have started to ripen and fall, we dry them in the sun in the kitchen window sill for a week and then they are ready to eat. Unlike our almonds, that always seem to need oven drying and slightly roasting to get the best out of them. The filberts are good to go, straight out of their shell after drying. This is our first good crop from them. We planted 2 year old grafted seedlings about 3 and 4 years ago, so the oldest ones are just starting to come to fruiting now. The first year, all the shells were empty. Last year we only got a few hands-full of nuts and half were hollow, but this year, they seem to have reached maturity, with most casings containing a nut — and they are lovely, crunchy and sweet. We have a few with a piece of nice cheese after dinner.

I’ve been in and out of the pottery pushing ahead with making pots for the next firing. We are technically still in fire ban season, so we can’t fire the big kiln easily at this time, as it takes 20 hours and is obvious to passers-by. But the little portable kiln is OK for a quick 3 1/2 hr. firing on the cooler days after some rain or a damp night of heavy dew. We can start early and finish before the day gets hot at mid day and after. It’s very convenient. We have settled into using just one wheel barrow of paddock falls, dry dead branches. I’ll have to try it with fresh split pine, old pallets and eucalypt heartwood in the future, but I can’t see any real problems there. Time will tell.

As the garden is thriving we have been eating fresh stuffed zucchini flowers. These are our 2nd planting of zucchinis. We are starting on our third planing of cucumbers, as the extremely hot days really frazzles them, and our 5th planting of raddishes etc. We are also enjoying capsicums stuffed with ricotta and our own dried tomatoes and herbs. We have started to dig the first 3 rows of the 2nd planting of potatoes. It looks to be a very prolific crop. We fill a box quickly. There are twenty rows to keep us well fed through the winter.

Regrettably, Janine and I went to the fish markets mid-week for a late sushi lunch on our way to an opening of a friends show at Watters Gallery later in the evening. I say regrettably, because I was struck down with food poisoning during the evening and had to leave early from the show, before my friend even turned up.

I’ve had to have 2 days off with the runs, and stomach cramps, unable to sleep through the first night without interruption. I am chastened and weakened, but starting to recover. An unwelcome surprise. I won’t be eating anything more from the sushi shop at the fish markets! Even now I’m still suffering a delicate stomach and slight head ache that makes it hard to concentrate. I have a load of work to do, but I’m not really up to achieving much just yet.

Best wishes from The Running Postman

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Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic

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