Four Generations of Porcelain Stone Clay Makers

Posted on 16/09/2015 by hotnsticky

Today I am going out to visit the very smallest of small-scale porcelain stone clay making workshops. This family have been crushing and grinding the local porcelain stone here for four generations. The building is located so far out of town and in such an isolated place, that even my friend and driver, who is a local, has difficulty finding his way there. So many little winding roads and intersection.

Eventually we arrive. Another liminal site, perched just above the edge of the rice paddies, on the edge of the farm track and just below the tea plantations higher up the hill. The family building is absolutely original and built by the great-grandfather here over 100 years ago. It’s a beautiful old wooden structure. Even the supporting frame-work for the stamp mills is completely original and made of wood. The machinery looks pretty original too, especially the stamp mills. The only real concession to modernity here now are the filter presses and the vacuum pug mills.

The family, Mother, father and son still do all of the initial work of sorting and selecting by hand. It is the only way to get the very best quality result. And the result is exceptional. No one else does this to every piece of stone that enters the workshop. One other factory, The Coda Factory, can put through small special batches of hand cleaned superior white stone body, but it is very expensive and only occasionally done these days. The other factories, like Tajima san’s, appear to just take the stone as it comes, wash it and run it all through the jaw crusher. (see, “More, not less, from Japan Posted on 16/11/2014)

On the other hand, this small ‘Fuchino’ family run business puts in a lot of effort to hand sort and classify all the minerals as they are all dumped in a 14 tonne pile straight from the tip truck that delivers the stone from the quarry.

First all the stones are sorted and classified into one of 3 groups. The native Amakusa stone is quite varied in its mineralogy with bands of various minerals throughout the deposit. The quarry doesn’t really discriminate that much. A truck load of this mixture can be processed all together as one composite material, as happens at the ‘Tajimi’ and other two clay makers. Here they spend an enormous amount of time sorting and classifying the mixed load into its components. There is felspar, silica and mica. The silica is deeply inter mixed with the felspar and looks for all intents and purposes, the same as the white sericite mica. However, there is a subtle difference in colour and weight. Added to this there is a very slight difference in hardness. Going on these minor differences alone and using 40 years of experience. The miller can tell the difference instantly and throws each of the stones onto a different pile as it passes through his hands.

To complicate matters, there are veins of iron, that have been leached from the parent material over the millions of years and found itsself concentrated in the cracks that permeate the mass of rock. The iron is slowly leached from the degrading stone as it weathers and concentrates there in the cracks and fissures in wet periods and then dries out and becomes insoluble. This concentrate of iron in the cracks, builds up over the millennia and makes for a red, orange, brown, blackish surface coating around each lump of rock.

To get the best result. The miller sits and patiently chips away the iron coating on each stone, to reveal the white mineral content inside. Hour by hour, day by day. The miller and his wife and son chip and scrape their way through the entire 14 tonnes of hard rock, until it is all sorted and cleaned. It takes them one month to process the 14 tonnes of stone. The result of this gargantuan effort of exacting perfection is three piles of stones which are processed separately.

First they are put through the stamp mills and reduced to a fine powder. It is then sieved and sorted again before blunging and sent to the levigation tanks, where the heavier, coarser silica particles are sedimented out and the finer clay and sericite mica fraction is floated off. This slurry is then concentrated and stiffened using a filter press, the only concession to modernity introduced since the great-grandfather built the operation over a hundred years ago. The stiffened filter cakes are then vacuum pugged and bagged ready for delivery.

The number one product is a very fine white sericite and kaolin based body perfect for the creation of the wheel thrown items. It fires pure white and translucent with perfect glaze fit. This is obviously the most expensive grade and is in very limited supply. The second grade material is creamy white, with a slight iron contamination, but only very slight. It fires white and translucent with perfect glaze fit. Number 2 body is plastic and throwable, just like number 1 body, just not as pure white. The third grade is somewhat yellowish and is made up of all the chipped, hammered, and scraped off iron fragments from the surface of the coloured stones. This is the cheapest grade and the least white, firing a bit grey, with reduced translucency and low plasticity, but with excellent glaze fit.

During my life as a potter, I’ve spent years, cleaning and sorting my collected native porcelain stones. I never really mentioned this to anybody lest they thought that I was mad. Now I know that I’m not. There are at least three other people in the world who are as committed to excellence as I am. The difference is that this family are well paid to produce this special clay for the most famous pottery families in Japan, and can boast that they supply clay to at least three ‘National Treasure’ category potters. These famous, Nationally awarded potters couldn’t have gained their unique status without the sustained diligence and commitment to excellence of this family.

It is an amazing experience to be able to be with these people, if only briefly. To see this old Wabi/sabi building. To learn of it’s long history. To speak with this couple. It’s all a bit amazing. They are so special and yet so ordinary and humble and uncomplicated. Just dedicated to their exacting work and very proud of their achievement. There is no other place like it in all of Japan, that I am aware of, and as this kind of work is pretty special to Japan. It might be safe to say the entire world. The effort that they have put in is rewarded with the status that they have achieved.

Myself, Tatsuya and Fuchino san

I’m thrilled to get to meet someone a little bit like me and to be able to throw my pots out of this unique material. Needless to say there is a months long waiting list for this couple’s product. There should be a National Treasure Award just for clay makers like these, who work at a very unsexy job, but who have elevated it to stratospheric levels of excellence.

I still find it hard to believe that it is possible to do what I have just seen with my very own eyes. I just didn’t really think that people still worked like this in a modern world. Taking so much time to be the best in the world, while not caring that anybody, other than their customers even know what they do. While we are there we buy 5 bags of this amazing stuff, but only the No.2 creamy white body today. There isn’t a skerrick of No.1 to be had for months yet. It appears to be all sold on advance order to the 3 National Treasure potters. I guess that this is one way of cementing your advantage over your other porcelaineous competitors?

I consider my self so lucky to be associated with Tatsuya san, and therefore able to use both the creamy white and hand selected, ultra-pure white varieties of this family’s clay while I am here. Tatsuya san has had a 40 year relationship with this clay making family and I am lucky to be able to tag along and reap that benefit.

I am grateful.

Best wishes from Steve on the outskirts of Arita

The White River Box Maker

Posted on 15/09/2015 by hotnsticky

I’m here in Arita and the layout of the little town follows the meanderings of the river and its feeder streams. This is a modern Japanese town, perhaps city? That has developed over its ancient foundation of porcelain footings. The little river that has prescribed the subsequent development has a few stories attached to it. I was told that the first Korean potter to come to this area, as a prisoner of war, called Ri Sam Pei, noted the absence of fish in the smaller upper river and that this was one of the signs of being in the vicinity of a porcelain stone area that he recognised from back at home in Korea. The water of this stream or upper river drains down from the rotten granite mountain of Izumiyama.

This water, as it drains through the fissures in the granite, leaches out both soluble potash alkali from the decomposing felspars in the granite, but also a tiny amount of kaolinized clay particles from that breakdown process. The mountain was once a molten granite pluton that was pushed up during a very ancient volcanic event, leaving the molten rock to cool slowly just below the surface. Once cooled and slightly eroded by surface weathering the exposed granite would normally take millions of years to degrade by normal surface weathering through the action of wind, rain and winter frosts and snow. What makes this place so unique is that something else happened here.

In just a few places in the world an event called hydrothermal-weathering take place. This involves the passage of superheated steam at hundreds of degrees centigrade rising upwards through the earths crust and passing out through cracks in the rocks of the mantle. In this particular case, it passed up through cracks in the granite mountain. The superheated steam strips out the soluble alkalis from the parent rock. In this case, the felspars in the granite, reducing it to pure white kaolin clay and altering the micas present in the granite, stripping them of their iron oxide and creating a unique form of white ‘plastic’ mica called ‘sericite’. This special combination of pure white plastic kaolin and pure white plastic mica, is a very rare find indeed and makes the perfect combination of minerals to create white, translucent porcelain.

The small amount of this pure white material that then slowly leached out of the rotten granite and into the stream killed the fish and turned the water a milky white. So the river became known as the ‘white river’, or ‘Shira-kawa’.

I don’t know how complete, accurate or even true these details about fish and sericite are? This is just what I was told.

I walk or bike along the Shirakawa river every day, just like all the locals who now drive along it here. The river doesn’t run white any more. Perhaps because the quarry is all but mined out now. Perhaps because of stringent, anti-pollution laws? I don’t know. There are ducks making living on the stream these days. I can’t say that I have seen any fish in the river.

However, I can see that there is a pretty good deposit of porcelain shards in the river bed now. At each bridge that I come to, there are shards to be seen in the shallows below. It would be interesting to walk the river bed and do a sampling of the various dates of those shards, at some dry period in the seasons. I’m sure that it must have already been done. There’s a PhD or MA Hons in there for sure, just waiting to be retrieved and analysed!

Today we are travelling along the stream on our way to visit the box maker. He lives a little out of town. On a beautiful little winding road, up through the forest. It’s all covered in moss and is deep in shade from all the tall trees on each side and the abundant humidity. There are springs trickling out of the rocks on the roadside. I call this part of the road the ‘shibui-dori’. It’s caught on with Miyuri and Tatsuya. It made them laugh. Now they are both calling it ‘shibui-dori’.

Working from home on the liminal edge, where the rice paddies stop and the forest begins. The box-maker has a small, humble house and next to it, large, industrial work shed, where he has all the machinery to make the boxes. The timber planks go in one end and the milled boards are planed and thicknessed, then edge glued to make large sheets, which are subsequently sawn back down to smaller sizes for the individual boxes required dimensions. The four sides fitted and glued together, then squared up and the bottoms installed, then the lids made. It’s all very exacting and precise work. Just like making the Arita style porcelain that goes inside them.

Although the shed is a bit ordinary looking from the outside. Everything inside is modern, and up-to-date, hand-fed, but electrically driven woodworking machinery. Its a pleasure to see the modern workings of someone’s workshop, involved in such modern, yet ancient craft skill. The boxes are just the same as they once were, but now, most of the processes are mechanised to reduce the labour cost. It’s an honour and a privilege to be allowed in here to see and watch the process first-hand. Hand made boxes like these are a bit expensive. You need to know that you will be able to sell quite a few of the pots packed in them, before engaging in ordering a full set for the all the work in a show. There is no way out. It is expected that a decent pot will come in a decent box here. It’s all part of the social contract.

In Australia, unlike Japan. Pots generally sell so cheaply, even in exhibitions these days in Oz, that it just isn’t possible to fund a good, hand-made box, from exotic timbers for each pot. But even here the pressure is on and the box maker now has to compete against cheap Chinese imported boxes. These of course are not custom-made for each pot, but imported in container loads of the most common sizes, for fast-moving items. What can he do. His only option is to aim higher for the high-end art market and hope that he can keep finding enough work to keep himself employed until he retires.

Globalisation is everywhere, affecting everyone. Even the box-maker.

The Soba Noodle Potter

Posted on 13/09/2015 by hotnsticky

I decide that today is my only chance to go and visit Mr Norito, or Noritou, or Noritow. I’ve seen it written in different ways. In Romanji it’s written as Norito, His web site is , but on his card, the hiragana ends in a ‘u’. So I think that Noritou is the best approximation that I can make.

I first met Noritou san when I was taken to his workshop for a brief mid-week visit. He is in his late 80’s I think, although he doesn’t look it. He’d pass for 60’s any time, but I’m told that he was selected as a very young kamikaze pilot at the end of the war. Not unlike my former teacher Shiga Shigeo, they only survived, because the military ran out of planes.

Noritou san is a very gentle character. I can tell from his manner and tone of voice.

He is also a very interesting potter. He is the only person that I have been introduced to so far that makes his own single stone porcelain body for his pots here in Arita. Regrettably I can’t speak Japanese well enough to understand any of the technical information that he is offering directly from him. However, I have Miyuri san with me on my first visit and she is a very competent translator. It was she who brought me here and told me that I really ought to meet this guy. “He’s a bit like you. he makes his own clay from stone”. So of course I had to come. He has no machinery, it’s all very hands on and time-consuming, as all clay making is, but he selects the softest, kaolin/sericite material that he can still find – I didn’t ask where, directly, but I got the impression from Miyuri san that it is from the old Izumiyama quarry. Even though it is now a preserved Historical site, apparently, there is a group of potters who want to preserve the old traditional ways, and Noritou san is one of them. They appear to have privileged access to collect small quantities of porcelain stone from the site. The archaeologist at the Historical Museum on site, maintains that there is still plenty of material in the quarry. This fits with my understanding of the nature of hydro-thermal weathering. it creates an inverted cone shape of ore body. So it should go down a long way, like an inverted image of the mountain that was formally there, now all mined away

Noritou san simply slakes his collected material in water and ashes for a year. Yes, that’s right ashes! He is telling me through Miyuri san that the ash-water, lye perhaps? is necessary to break down the clayey particles and remove the iron staining from the various contaminants? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – but!

That is what I was told, or what I think that I heard, but there could be some loss in translation, Ne! He shows me his slaking tubs. I dip my hand into the water. It is certainly slippery, just like lye. This is exactly the opposite of my understanding of clay making. I know from my own experiments, that when I grind the porcelain stone down to powder, it breaks some the chemical bonds of the alkali in the felspars, releasing some soluble alkali. This makes the resulting clay rather ‘floppy’ to use. Sort of thixotropic in nature, becoming softer and more fluid as it is worked, making it difficult to hold its form on the potters wheel. The counter to this is to add some acidic material into the mix to counter the release of alkalis and neutralise them. I choose to use the roof water from my water tank connected to the pottery roof, which has loads of eucalyptus leaves in the gutters, and makes the water naturally acidic. I also add vinegar. As I understand it, clay develops its plasticity better under slightly acid conditions as it ages. The low pH encourages the growth of beneficial bacteria that increases the workability of the mix. Maybe Noritou san knows this too, but is talking about something else entirely. And all this through an interpreter. Imagine what is happening now that I’m here alone this time?

Actually, I don’t always need a lot of words. I’ve spent close to 50 years as a potter, so I have a fair understanding of what is happening in the pottery just through observation. It’s mostly all I need. My limited Japanese is only just greetings and platitudes, in-depth, technical discussion is beyond me, but I manage.

The other very interesting thing about Noritou san, is that he does many things, just like me. We don’t just share a love of fossicking and clay making. He also teaches pottery to visitors on one or two days during the week to bolster his income, because you can imagine, his income from making ceramics by his chosen, slow, hands-on method is very low. That part of the conversation we both agree on! So, a little bit of teaching from home, just like me. The really interesting bit is that he opens his home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for lunch and early dinner, something like 11am to 7 pm. He operates a hand-made soba noodle shop and is very famous locally. I’m warned to go early as he is usually booked out, so I do. Naughtily, I arrive 15 mins before he is due to open. I’m first in.

He and his wife make all the buckwheat noodles themselves by hand in the old-fashioned traditional manner, allowing them to sit over-night before cooking them, in the time-honoured way. This ageing maximises the buckwheat flavour. I can’t wait to get back there again. It’s Sunday today, so you can guess where I’m going. It’s my last chance, as I’m leaving next Sunday and am booked with other things planned on the other two days.

The meal comes in 3 servings, an amuse of tea and room temperature, crisp, fried buckwheat noodles, with just a hint of salt. Then the main course of cold, handmade noodles with an adjunct of warm soup to follow. There are some condiments of grated daikon radish, finely chopped green onions and wasabi, with a small separate dish of pink salt. Finally, there is a desert of sweetened buckwheat paste. It’s all terribly yummy. All this for Y800. That’s less than $10.

We exchange gifts, I have brought him a jar of Australian honey and he gives me one of his pots.

His advertising says that you can eat your handmade soba noodle lunch from his hand-made porcelain-stone, soba cup/bowl and them buy the cup. I do just that. It’s a warm autumn day and just right for cold soba.

from Steve in Arita, enjoying the food, porcelain-stone cold soba

Izumiyama and the Shira Jiki

Posted on 11/09/2015 by hotnsticky

I’m working in a workshop in Arita, in Kyushu. I’m trying to learn something about working with single stone porcelain. The potters of Arita in Japan have been making porcelain ‘jiki’ pots out of this single crushed stone from the izumiyama mountain quarry for four hundred years and they have developed a technique or two in that time. I’m keen to learn just a fraction of that knowledge in the very brief 5 weeks that I have here.

Arita is famous for being the first place in Japan where porcelain stone was discovered and white porcelain was subsequently made here. This place has a very long history. The first porcelain being made here in 1616. Since then the industry has had it’s highs and lows. We are currently in a low. Just like everywhere else in the world, the industry here is facing steep competition from China. Only a couple of decades ago, there were 300 studios here in this little town. Now there are only 100 and falling steadily. No country or industry can compete with the low cost-base of China. The best hope that they have is to engage with people like me, cultural tourists. I’m prepared to pay for the experience of working here in this amazing place, with this unique material that they have here. Merging traditional porcelain manufacture with paid workshop access for artists could be the difference between financial survival in the future. This town needs more accommodation and restaurants, if it is to encourage more longer-stay cultural tourism. Something more than the usual casual day-visit for shopping.

I don’t think that they really understand how rare and amazing this stuff really is on a global scale. So don’t fully understand its true value and what they have to offer. It’s just so normal for them here, after so many centuries. They don’t realise the special nature of what they have. It’s bred by familiarity! As all the workshops seem to be struggling financially, People like me could be the cash cows of the future, or at least part of the fiscal solution.

In the early 1600’s, the great Japanese Warlord Hideoshi invaded Korean. He captured potters and repatriated them to Japan. Rendition! It sounds familiar? A potter, named Ri Sampei, he was actually a part time potter and part time vegetable grower (farmer). Sounds familiar. He was captured and brought to this place. He soon discovered the special porcelain stone in the mountain of Izumiyama just outside of the village of Arita. He recognised it for what it was and began to make the first white porcelain in Japan, called Shira Jiki. The rest is history.

First day, I start with a clean wheel and pot boards, + a few lumps of porcelain clay.

So I’ve come to this place to experience the special southern Japanese porcelain techniques that have been developed here. This stuff is amazing, sufficiently plastic to throw well enough, so that you don’t really think that you are throwing with a ground up piece of stone. It is quite strong and stands up well on the wheel. Not vigorous, but sufficiently robust to make reasonable forms easily. For me anyway.

It is miles away from what I’m used to. The hard rock that I grind up at Home is a solid, non-plastic affair. I know from my reading that this stone here, is highly weathered. In a form known to geologists as ‘hydrothermal weathering’, where hot steam has passed through fissures in the parent rock, reducing what was formerly hard granite, to a soft crumbly type of soft white mica called Sericite. Sericite is both slightly plastic, throwable and highly fluxed at the same time. Plus, it is very low in iron oxide. A very unusual combination of characteristics. Only a few places in the world have materials like this at hand.

I find that the clay is used so soft here in this workshop, that I can’t separate my pots from the wheel-head using a conventional cutting string and lifting technique that I’m used to. I find that I have to use so much force to allow air in under the pot to lift it, that it distorts the bowl. I take a moment to make myself an extra thick, double twisted, multi-stranded, cutting string. The texture that it creates as it passes through the ultra-fine porcelain clay allows air to penetrate, so breaking the vacuum seal and allowing the pot to be easily removed from the wheel head.

I settle in for a few of weeks of intensive work. We work together, side by side.

I’m, in the workshop of Tsutsui Tatsuya. He is very experienced, having spent 40 years in this workshop. Purpose built, up on the hill overlooking Arita’s U-Tan district. I spend half a day throwing my pots and then spend a week turning them, and so it goes for the rest of my time here. I soon fill my shelves and then I’m looking for more storage space in the overhead racks, above the wheels.

The turning here is a different story to what I’m used to. It takes me back to my student days working for the Japanese Potter Shiga Shigeo. He was trained in the porcelain techniques of Kyoto and worked for the ‘Nation Treasure’ potter Tomimoto in Kyoto, another porcelain centre of excellence in Japan. Here they turn not just outside, but inside as well. I’m not used to that. I have tried in the past to get my form just about right on the wheel, so that there would be as little turning as possible. Here they all seem to use the ‘nobebere’ profile stick to throw the forms. Another thing that I’m not used to. But I’m here to learn and to experiment.

This work requires you to be both meticulous in detail and therefore precise in your hand-eye co-ordination, I’m not too sure if I’m up to it, but I give it my best, roughing out on the next day and turning down to form on the third, then the precise thinning and finishing when it is bone dry on the next, or any time after really. It doesn’t matter once it is fully dried out. I get to use my new tungsten-carbide-tipped turning tools for the job. I’ve colour-coded them. I need to get out more!

made by Steve in Arita

First pot finished, 89 to go.

A gecko comes to visit me while I’m turning.

Today Tatsuya made us a cup of matcha for afternoon tea break. It was amazing. He offered me his father’s Karatsu tea bowl and chose to use the bowl that I had recently given him as a gift, for himself. The tea looked really good in them. We both reached for our cameras at the same time. We laughed! So funny!. We were both thinking that we ought to record the special image of this very particular event on our cameras.

It’s a modern world, in this ancient place. So full of history, you can taste it!

The perfect juxtaposition of then and now.

fond regards from Old Steve in the New Arita, Japan

Desperately Seeking Tungsten

Posted on 21/08/2015 by hotnsticky

I’m freewheeling in Kyoto for a while. It’s one of my favourite cities to visit. Its small enough to be walkable to most places. A long walk sometimes, admittedly, but then there is an excellent bus and train service that can get you to most places that are a little bit out-of-the-way. It’s quite central to my other interests, as Nara, Osaka and Shigaraki are just short train rides away and good for a day trip. There are more temples and shrines than you can poke a (chop)stick at. I have a few favourites.

But Kiyomizu has to be one of them, as it is easy walking distance from the centre of town or the main station and the roads that lead up to it are a very interesting days entertainment. No matter which way you approach it, there is always something of interest. Because it’s so close to town, it is alway very busy and crowded. A minor drawback.

On this visit to Kyoto, I’m searching for some tungsten carbide tipped pottery turning tools for working with porcelain. They are very specialised tools and a bit hard to find. Actually a lot hard to find! It seems that they are only made in 3 places in the world. Nevada in the US, but the style of those tools are not really what I’m after. Plus his web site isn’t working at the moment and the guy is moving shop currently. Then there is a place somewhere in China, but I haven’t been able to locate just where. Whenever I came across some of these tools during my resent research trip, I was told that the tools were from ‘somewhere else’, then when I got to the ‘somewhere else’ they told me that it wasn’t there, but where I’d just come from? Now I’m in Kyoto and tipped off by my friend Alistair back in Australia, who trained here some time ago, actually many years ago. I hope to track them down here. Alistair doesn’t know the address, but knows someone, who knows someone, who apparently might know.

I’m onto it, nothing like a false start and a dud lead to peak my interest. I like a challenge. When these tools do turn up in Australia, they are terribly expensive when they do, exceeding $100 each. A lot for a small, simple pottery tool. They shatter easily if you drop them, and chip if you hit them against something hard by accident. But they are unbelievably hard-wearing and long-lasting, as long as you look after them. I only own one of them.

So, I set off on my long march. Firstly, I tried to find the ‘Iwasaki’ pottery supply shop that Alistair’s potter friend mentioned. But nothing came up in google maps for that address.

So I asked the very helpful lady here at the guest house, where I’m renting a room. She rang them and got a detailed description of where it was. I walked there. I found it pretty quickly, but it was only a small supply shop with not much choice and no carbide tipped turning tools at all in stock.

However, I bought 2 small brushes and standard carbon steel turning tool. The guy behind the counter didn’t speak much English, but managed to understand what I was looking for after a while. ‘Tungsten carbide’ isn’t a word that I know in Japanese, it takes a lot of charades to get that one across.

He wrote out the name and address for another place, but only in Japanese ‘Kanji” characters. I was starting to feel like this might be going to be a bit like hard work. This might not even be a place-name or address? I’d have to go back to the Inn and get it translated and the place on the map pointed out to me. If indeed it is one. He can’t read my map of Kyoto, as it is in English. He just waves me down the road. “a long way!”

But just at this time, another guy who apparently works in the shop turns up and he can point out on my map, more or less, the area where I need to go. Unfortunately, it’s off the detailed part of my tourist-guide map and into the grey. There be dragons! Yep. That part of the map. I’ve never been to this part of town, so have no mental guideposts for it, but it can’t be that difficult. Can it?

It’s a long walk and it’s a hot steamy, humid late summers day. I manage to work up quite a sweat by the time that I get to where I think that it ought to be. Only to find that it isn’t there. I can’t find it, after all No one that I ask, seems to know. I think that it ought to be up this hill on this road somewhere. I’m only half way up this hill and I’m already feeling a bit ‘over the hill’. So I ask a passing bloke. He doesn’t understand me at all, and he can’t read my map. This is an isolated part of town with few passers-by. So I sort of give up and begin walking back down to find someone who can help me. This is when I come across a couple taking their groceries into their house from the car. I ask again, show him the name and he seems to know what it is and where it is. This special place that I’m after. He goes into the house and comes back with a ‘Gregorys’ type street map book. Lots of detail. He shows me where it is, and I was very close, about 300 metres away but in the wrong street. It turned out to be down and around a lot of small lanes off the main street. He draws me a map of the local lanes, and off I go into the back lanes, left, right, second left, then right again, just where he said. I take careful note of all the turns and corners so as to be able to find my way back OK.

The people in there, didn’t have much English either, but the lady managed a bit, especially when I showed her the tool that I just bought. It all ‘clicked’ into place and out she came with 3 trays of carbide tipped turning tools. Kan-na.

I bought 5 different shapes from around Y2,500 to 3,800 yen each. That’s somewhere around Au$30 to 50 dollars.

I then had to walk all the way back. Somehow, the return journey is a lot easier. It’s not just because it’s all down hill, and matches my career. No, it’s because I succeeded in doing it, more or less, on my own, even though I had a lot of help. Thanks Alistair, Aki, Yusushi and Kahori San.

My home-made ground bai tunze porcelain stone body is just like throwing with fine sand and water mixture. It is very tough on the fine razor edge of my turning tools. Especially because this kind of ceramic paste ‘clay’ body. and I use the word ‘clay’ here not as a description of anything plastic and workable, but as a generic term to describe what a potter works with on the wheel. My own particular native porcelain stone is a hard igneous rock. I collect it in chunks from a very small hill, or a big mound, where it has pushed up through the ground in some sort of volcanic activity. Too small to be called a hill, and larger than a mound. I decided to call it a knoll. That sounds just about right. Because it is mostly composed of felspar, which melts in the potters kiln at high temperatures to be a tough glass, I decided to call it the glassy knoll.

Now, because it hasn’t been ‘weathered’ or degraded by the elements as yet, it is very dense and hard. It needs to be broken down in two stages in a couple of different rock crushers, first into gravel size, then into small sand sized fragments. It is then ground for hours in a ball mill before it is fine enough to work with. It does not have very much clay mineral in its make-up, so I add a small amount, 1%, of bentonite to my mix. Bentonite is a very fine sticky clay material that I get from Queensland. It is quite a rare material, and one of the few ‘exotic’ minerals that I buy. In the US, they seem to call bentonite ‘V’ gum. I don’t know why, but it’s an interesting name. This ceramic ‘gum’ helps to bind it all together, a bit like a glue, so as to make it a little more responsive on the wheel.

How it all works, such that it makes a native rock, that I can pick up off the ground , into a translucent, hard porcelain, is amazing to me. There is probably a conspiracy theory about it somewhere on the web? So I have decided to explain it by calling it “The single gum theory from the glassy knoll”. That should quash any hint of conspiracy!

fond regards from Steve in Kyoto

Enjoying the Now

Posted on 17/08/2015 by hotnsticky

We have our pottery back to ourselves again now, so it’s back to the wheel for us. We work at our kick wheels, set either side of the old pot belly stove which has been generating a steady gentle heat to keep us warm on the coldest of days for the best part of 40 years now. I’m amazed at how it has kept on going for so long with only minor repairs.

Throwing pots out of these ground rock ceramic pastes is a slow process. We have to plan ahead so that everything must be thrown thicker than you might like and then there is a lot of turning to be done. Some times we rough the forms out on one day, then let them dry overnight until they are almost completely dry, before finishing them off to the thinner desired cross-section. They can’t be bone dry, or they might break under the pressure of the turning tool, but they can’t be damp either, as then they will chip and tear. Milled rock paste isn’t like ordinary clay. It’s just not very plastic. It needs to be turned just before bone dry. Grinding away at what is essentially sand and water mix really takes the edge off my home made metal strip turning tools. I have to resharpen then after every 2nd pot, just to keep the edge keen.

The garden is starting to respond to the increasing day length and the hint of warmth in the air. I can see a poppy bud starting to show some red colour and there are swelling buds on the blueberries. We have just picked our first asparagus spears as an aperitif before our other vegetable dinner. These are all good signs of the warmer spring weather to come.

The Japanese Wasabi plants have grown well through the cool wet of the winter and are looking good right now. It’s that hot dry summer heat that knocks them around. I planted onion seeds 2 months ago. A lot of it came up on time, but for some reason, one packet of seed, just sat there and did nothing until now. This variety must need warmer weather to germinate. all the other plants are now 100 mm or more high. I hope that these plants can get enough growing season before it gets too hot and dry for them in the summer? Just down the row a little we have a nice crop of Pak Choi, lovely for stir fry, or just steamed with a little garlic, ginger and soy. 2 mins and melt in your mouth, with still some nice fresh crunch in the warm but fresh and crunchy stems.

I have made what is probably the last batch of marmalade for this year. As the citrus season has all but come to an end. I make a batch of cumquat. blood orange, and lemon marmalade. I finish it off with a dash of whisky before bottling. It’s unusual, it looks great and tastes better.

thumb_DSC01224_1024 tonight’s dinner is spinach with ricotta, Brussel sprouts, initially lightly steamed, then finished in a pan-fried with garlic and chilli, served with steamed potato and pumpkin.

Another recent meal was pork medallions pan-fried in olive oil and garlic, he deglazed with a splash of a nice chardonnay, served with lentils simmered in home-made marrow bone and veggie stock, then plated up with mushrooms in white sauce.

We have plenty of cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts at the moment, as the winter chill weather draws to a close. I have been enjoying lightly steamed Brussel Sprouts, which are then pan-fried in some home-made stock. In this case chicken stock, and finished with a little sesame oil and pan-fried and tossed for a few minutes. They get a few caramelised spots on them as they roll around, a slight grind of fresh pepper and some vegetable salt. Delicious.

No better way to enjoy the crisp cold of winter.

There was an article in a recent issue of ‘New Scientist’ magazine. (No. 3032, 1/8/15) That told of the health benefits of eating bitter foods like Brussels sprouts.

The Brassicas have several bitter phytonutrients that are produced by the plant to make them unappetising to predators – like us, as well as caterpillars. Sulforaphane is one such protective phytonutrient that gives them the particular sulphur smell. It has anti-cancer functions and is an antioxidant. I usually have a small nibble on what there is in the garden, snapping it off and eating it raw while I wander around, weeding and watering, crunching and chewing as I go. They must be good for me?

I really like the idea of going to the garden each day/evening and picking what needs eating on that day, because it is absolutely ready to be picked, organically grown and totally fresh. This is self-reliance, living with the seasons.

Enjoying the now!

Best wishes from Steve and Janine, who are vegging out in the late winter.

Back to the Wheel

Posted on 13/07/2015 by hotnsticky

My hand is sufficiently healed now for me to return to throwing on the potters wheel. My finger is still numb at the end, but otherwise I’m all OK and I feel that I can throw again OK. That’s my opinion, others watching me might differ. I’ve never been a ‘power thrower’ or aspired to be a virtuoso on the wheel. I am sufficiently capable and skilled to be able to make the ideas that are in my head come to life. I’ve done my several thousands of hours of practise over the past 48 years, so I’m OK with what I attempt to do.

It’s a funny feeling, starting wedging again after a month off. It’s like a ‘getting to know you’ all over again, kind of feeling.

I can’t wait to get back into it now that we have done our last wood firing weekend workshop. We can have our kiln back now and start to plan for our own firings. Wedging up the clay and making these first pots is the start. I used to think that I could do both. Run these workshops and make a few pots as well. Last year we managed to sneak a firing of our own in, in-between the set firings with the workshop groups. However, it seems to take all our energy to just clean and maintain the kiln as well as cut, split and stack all the wood required for the firings, plus keeping part of the pottery set up as a kitchen. There isn’t any time left to be able to pack, fire and unpack the kiln with our own work in the 5 days in-between each of the other firings, as well as cutting and splitting our own wood for our firing as well. It all proved too much work for me and I just couldn’t manage to do it all. We have done 11 weekends in 13 weeks. I’m glad that we can have some space to make and fire our own work now.

On a brighter note there was an exhibition review of the ‘Turn, turn, turn’ exhibition at the NAS Gallery in Sydney. One of the six shows that I have work in currently. It is amazing that an exhibition of ceramics has been given any space at all in a major Sydney newspaper. It is even more amazing that the reviewer, Christopher Allen was given almost two pages to do the job. I can’t remember a ceramics show getting any oxygen at all in a major newspaper in Sydney for the past twenty years, so I was particularly thrilled to find that my own work got two paragraphs at the end of the review. I don’t know how this has all come about, but I appreciate it enormously, as it will most likely be the only time in my life that this will happen, as ceramics isn’t highly valued in critical circles in Australia.

It’s amazing to me that when it happened, I was part of it.

I am grateful!

Christopher Allen wrote;

“…Steve Harrison represents the culmination of the art of the potter in the East Asian traditions. His deceptively simple and yet refined and serene vessels are the product of the humble, meditative practice of the potters art and reflect, indeed his own choice of a life in harmony with his aesthetic ideals.

These are works that ostensibly seek only to serve the craft and subsume them selves to its formal demands, which make no attempt to claim our attention with brash or sensational effects, and yet which silently draw us to them by the force and conviction of their integrity.”

Christopher Allen, ‘Wheels of Creation’, Weekend Australian, Review, Visual Arts, P10/11. July 11/12 2015.

Best wishes

Steve

Nothing is Perfect!

Posted on 26/06/2015 by hotnsticky

We have just had our latest wood firing and all went well, as usual, thank goodness. We do our best, but we can make no guarantees, only mistakes!. We found that only a few pots made from an imported Japanese porcelain clay dunted. Glazed only on the inside too. Maybe that was the problem? Apart from this it was a very good firing!

After the firing we get out and about and get stuck into some timber cutting and splitting. I’m up and out early with the chain saws, long before any one comes to help. Chain saws are dangerous enough without anyone else being around to watch out for and keep at a safe distance. We split about half of the 40 or so lengths that I have cut and prepared, but then the throttle lever on the splitter motor comes off in my hand. Cheap Chinese made splitter! So work has to come to a halt for the day while I fix it. We spend the rest of the time stacking and moving all that we have split over to the kiln shed. When everyone is gone. I take the splitter motor to bits looking for where the bolt or screw has fallen out. How could the throttle lever just come off in my hands? I can’t see where it has come from. Where it ought to be, but there ought to be an obvious spot with tell-tale wear marks, to indicate where it belongs. A place with a missing bolt! Just like in an Agatha Christie novel. there ought to be some clues, but the more I look, the less I know. I can’t believe it. Surely I’m not this inadequate and simple that I can’t see a missing bolts hole. I have removed half the engine, the air cleaner, and part of the carbie!

All the mechanism is installed under the air filter on one side and the muffler on the other. All the linkages are under the petrol tank. Everything is hard to get to and nothing is clear. There are metal wire linkages and tiny little, fine wire, return springs. I can’t see where any of it really belongs and to make it harder, the days are so short and it is starting to get dark.

Then, finally, it dawns on me. It hasn’t fallen off because of a missing bolt or nut. It has simply shattered in half from metal fatigue and the rest of it is still all attached. It has cracked in half. I need to remove more of the engine to get all of it off, so that I can weld it back together again. I can’t do it on the machine, next to the carburetor, and all that fuel! I take a couple of photos as I go to remind me later on when I’m re-assembling it. So that I can get it all back together again in the right order.

Years ago, I used to write all of this kind of thing down in my day book – sort of diary thing, but now I just take photos. Because I can! When I was young, my first car was an old, classic, red, MG sports car. When I had to pull the engine down the first time. I wrote everything down, step by step and recorded all the detail that I thought was going to be necessary to re-assemble it. I numbered and bagged all the parts in sequence. I had never had to do anything like this before and my father wasn’t much interested or even around to give any guidance, so I just muddled through with the help of my older brother, who also had absolutely no experience of this kind of motor mechanics, but make encouraging noises and was supportive, especially when it came to lifting the donk out. We were completely incompetent and naive, but we managed to get it all back together again and it worked! it was quite a triumph for us. Especially for me.

When it was all done and back together. I had one nut left over, and to this day I still don’t know where it belonged. but the car still worked! Nothing is perfect!

Today, I get this small engine all stripped down and then set about welding the shattered pieces back together again. I think about making a new one, but the thing is so complex and folded in so many different places with so many holes and little tags and bits sticking out, that I decide to just repair it. Nothing is perfect! I don’t know how long it will last. Nothing lasts! It is only very thin pressed metal material. I can’t give it too many amps. I don’t want to burn a hole through it, and I can only weld one side too, because it has to have a flush face on the other side, so that it will swivel properly on it’s seating. I weld it as best that I can, after testing the amperage on a test piece, so as to get the best result. I get good penetration! What more could a man want! But there is a little burn-through in one spot on the weld, so I have to grind it back a little to get it flush and smooth.

I manage to get it all back together before dark and back into the shed. It’s a bit of a rush, but there are no medals for giving up! I give it a trial run and it works OK. Time will tell if it continues to work for the long term. I go up to the house in the dark and the key snaps off in the lock. This is just what I need! One of the joys of living in a 122 year old house is doing the maintenance. I leave it till morning to take the lock off and fix it in daylight. I can’t see well enough in the dark and fixing locks, with all the fine moving parts is something that needs to be done in a clear frame of mind and good daylight. Fortunately it isn’t too difficult and it turns out to be something that I have had to do before, so it is relatively simple and straight forward and it is all back into working order pretty quickly and before lunch time. Nothing is perfect and nothing is ever finished.

Because crap things always seem to come in threes, at least that is how it appears today. The water tank springs a leak. It has been leaking with a slow drip for a year or more now, but today, it springs a proper leak and The Lovely comes in to tell me that as she walked past the tank stand just now, and it felt like it was raining. This happened a couple of days ago too and she thought that she might have been imagining it. But today she is sure. We go and have a look. The timber tank stand deck is all wet underneath, just as it has been for a few years now, where the slow drip is, but now there is a little fountain pissing from the far side. It’s only very tiny, but it is surely a leak in the side of the tank now. I get the ladder and check it out at close quarters. The water has corroded through the zink coated corrugated steel sheeting. My highly imaginative and creative thinker thought that she was imagining it a few weeks ago when she felt a little fine water spray on her as she walked past the wood shed near by the tank stand. At that time, she imagined that it might be a cicada pissing from high up in a tree, or some other explanation. But now we know that it is real and not imagined. It’s a very tiny, fine spray of water from the pin prick sized hole, but once these things start. It’s always terminal.

I order a new tank, it’s all so specific these days. The height, the diameter, the colour, the inlet, the outlet side etc. It all goes on and on. This is not a current or popular size and configuration however. We will have to go on the waiting list. He rings me back the next day, They have one of those in stock it seems and so I can drive in and pick it up. Amazing! It has to be pretty much the same, because I don’t want to have to change over all the plumbing into a new configuration. When working up a 6 metre ladder. right at the top, it’s scarry enough.

I ring my friend Dave with the crane truck. he can come very late today on his way home. I drain all the water out of the tank and strip it of all its fittings and connectors. I swap all of these onto the new tank. Now we have no water in the house to cook, wash or flush with until it is all put back to rights. I hope that Dave doesn’t forget. He rings to say that he will be a little late, but he is here before dark. Which is good, if you are working on a narrow ladder rung, right at the top of a 6 metre ladder, up from the ground, you don’t want to be doing it in the dark.

It all goes smoothly and all the fittings that I swap over are all in the correct place and in the right direction, or orientation for further use.

The old tank comes down and the new one goes into its place without a hitch. I only have to reconnect the inlet and outlet pipes.

Once it is back in place, Dave leaves for another job, I have to start the pump to refill it with water again, so that we can get on with our normal life.

The Wet One thinks that this tank is only a few years old. I think that it is probably a bit more than that, but not too old. Not more than ten years! Nothing lasts. However, when I check out the paperwork, it turns out that it is actually 20 years since we put it up on the tank stand. The earlier tank had lasted 21 years and would have lasted longer, but the tank stand rusted out first and fell, crashing to the ground with the water tank still on it. Needless to say, neither survived, nor did the wood shed that it landed on.

I’m just a bit concerned that this new water tank is made of plastic and not galvanised steel like all the others have been. I wasn’t ever happy with the first tank that was made of galvanised steel and sealed with lead solder! But it did last for over 20 years and our first storage tank lasted for over 30 years, but the zink finally corrodes and they start to leak, so we replaced them with new ones. These newer tanks were made from zincalume coated steel, so couldn’t be soldered, that’s good, but they had to be sealed with silicon rubber glue. Not too happy about that either. Nothing is perfect! The last metal tank that we bought was lined with a plastic membrane heat sealed on to the inside of the zincalume sheets. It was called aquaplate, but didn’t last any longer and it was silicone sealed as well. Nothing is perfect!

Plastic is in everything. It’s OK while it lasts, but what will happen to this plastic tank when it finally gets eaten away by the sunlight or what ever is its fate? Can it be recycled? Al least the steel ones can be. I still have and use my parents old galvanised steel water tank. They bought it second-hand in the fifties, so it’s been in constant use in this family for over 60 years and is clearly a lot older, it shows no signs of corrosion yet. It was made out of thick steel plate and hot dipped in molten zinc. That was a product made to last. I have been told that it was a ships tank, but I don’t know. In future I may have to weld up my own tank and get it hot dipped galvanised, just like I do with my kilns. I like things that are made to last as long as possible.

However, I’m also aware that nothing is ever finished, nothing lasts and nothing is perfect.

You live and learn!

Best wishes

Steve

Why Not Both?

Posted on 26/05/2015 by hotnsticky

Jingdezhen in China has a very long history of making porcelain. Over one thousand years in fact. They had already celebrated their millennium of porcelain making when I was working there ten years ago. The special thing about this place is the clay. It isn’t clay!

What they use here is a ground-up stone. When they crush and finely grind the local stone down into a very fine paste, it becomes plastic. This is like magic. Stone doesn’t usually become sticky and plastic like clay unless it’s very special. This stone is largely composed ofsericite mica, and it is special. It is reasonably rare stuff to find en-mass, in its pure white form. It has a flat plate-like crystal structure, not unlike clay, only much coarser. When these microscopic plates are wetted, they slide about against each other in a similar way to the way that clay does. Of course it’s so much more complicated than that, but this is a blog and not a treatise. Sufficient to say that there are very few places in the world where this kind of thing can happen. Here in China is one of them and the initial place where it was first discovered. Once the knowledge was well-developed in china, the information spread to Korea, where they discovered and developed similar materials, then eventually to Japan. When the War Lord Hideyoshi invaded Korea and brought back potters as war trophies!. My, how the level of respect for potters has fallen! I don’t recall any solder capturing and bringing back any potters as trophies from any recent wars that we have been engaged in!

One of these ‘renditioned’ Korean potters discovered a similar weathered stone on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, and so porcelain making started up there as well. I have visited these sites and made pots there and I intend to go back again and make a more substantial body of work there, just as I have done here in Jingdezhen, that I can bring back and exhibit all together back in Sydney. Hopefully at Watters Gallery.

My interest in these porcelain stones is all based on the surprise discovery 15 years ago, when I stumbled upon a very small deposit of pale rock in the side of a track, out in the bush. I collected a very small sample and crushed it down to dust so that I could test it for use as a glaze ingredient. It made a lovely pale blue glaze of the family of glazes that could be described as being like ‘celadon’ or ‘guan’. These are ancient Chinese archetypes of fundamental combinations of simple ingredients. They are the simplest of glazes, but just about the most difficult to re-create with the depth and subtlety that the Chinese potters achieved at the apogee of their ceramic development, during the Song Dynasty.

I recognised that my initial glaze tests, although crude, had potential to be developed into something special, but more than that I noticed that most of the tests were ‘crawled’. This would normally mean that there was too much clay in the recipe, but this recipe had no clay in it at all. It was just hard rock. Very hard rock. I had to use my jaw crusher, disc disintegrator and then 16 hours in the ball mill to grind it down to a fine powder. I asked myself. “How could such a hard rock have any plasticity. Does it have any plasticity?” I quickly ran to the pottery and mixed a little of the precious powdered rock dust with some water and worked it up in to a paste, then proceeded to try to throw it on the potter’s wheel into a small bowl form. It could just about be done. It was rough and misshapen, but it was a bowl. I fired it and to my astonishment, it fired into translucent porcelain. I coudn’t have been more surprised!. 100% rock dust and water became white, translucent porcelain!

I know the date that I did this experiment, because I scratched the date into the bottom of that first pot.

After 25 years of fossicking around this shire. I had finally found something really exciting and with a lot of potential to carry my work forward for a long time to come. So here I am in the clay making facility in Jingdezhen. The home and origin of single stone porcelain. They don’t do all the production here anymore. Some of the large machines sit idle now. It seems that they only do the final stage of blunging (washing) the clay into a slip and sieving it through a very fine mesh to remove any unexpected rubbish that may have crept in during transport and storage. This ensures that there will be very few ‘iron’ spots in the finished product. The liquid clay ‘slip’, is then pumped into a filtering machine to de-water it back to a plastic, workable state. This de-watering procedure is called filter-pressing. This filter pressing (stiffening) is done in very large filtration dryers until it is ‘plastic’. ie. stiff enough to fashion into shapes, by moulding or throwing on the potters wheel.

Once the clay has been stiffened in this way, it is dropped out of the filter press and is taken to the extruder, to be pugged into well mixed sausages for storage and ageing.

The ‘clay’ (milled stone) material is trucked-in as a partially processed material these days. It used to be all processed here, but now it undergoes its primary crushing, milling and stiffening out-of-town, closer to the mine. When I was here last, all of the crushing was done by water powered, wooden hammers. these were typical of the water hammers that are to be found all over Asia, where-ever there is a suitable stream and work that needs doing. The powdered rock dust was then slaked in water and left to sit and dissociate, allowing the water to penetrate into the flakey, plate-like structure of the mineral. Breaking it down into a slurry with enormous surface area and also allowing the local bacterial to colonise the surfaces and work their magic to help enhance the workability and plasticity of the finished ‘clay’. This thick slurry was then stiffened slowly in the air and eventually formed into little white blocks or bricks called ‘bai-tunze’, or ‘white brick’. This is the form that it was delivered to the pottery clay processors.

But that was then and this is now!

Apparently the water hammers were working here up until last year some time. Due to pressure to increase production and through-put, these ancient water hammers were ripped out and the leats that brought the water were filled-in and concreted over. 3 phase power has arrived now and all the work should be being done by jaw crusher, huge ball mills and filter presses. but when we arrive, we find the place devoid of activity. The power is down and has been all day, possibly yesterday also. and who knows when it will be restored? A lone woman sits by idly and bored and waits. Perhaps the old water hammers had some advantages? They may be a bit slow, but they ran for free and all day and night as well. So why no both?

Jingdezhen native sericite stone.

This stuff is beautiful to work with, fine and smooth and so much more plastic and supportive on the wheel. I like it a lot. Of course my stone isn’t semi-plastic sericite, it’s just plain old hard, weathered, aplite. A quick cooled acid rock. It doesn’t become very workable without a lot of effort and time applied. However, I have found that after 6 years of storage in a cool dark place, it comes out not too different to the fresh stuff from Jingdezhen. I just need to buy some time! Time is the most expensive ingredient in my work.

Best wishes

from the patient and timely Old Rocker

Be Careful What You Wish For!

Posted on 23/05/2015 by hotnsticky

Only a few weeks ago, just after Easter. The Lovely and I were driving back from Canberra, our Nations Capital. It’s a little over a two-hour drive up the freeway. It’s pretty boring but fortunately not too long. I was thinking out loud and said to Janine. “You know, I should try and go back to China and do a little more research into the original bai-tunze porcelain stone that they have worked on and developed for over a thousand years now. I should go back to the Fragrant Garden Studio where I worked a decade ago and make some bowls out of their native stone. That would be a good project. I could exhibit them along-side my own native porcelain stone pots.” The Lovely just nodded and said something like. “Yeah. Go ahead, that sounds good.”

Then two days later, I got an email from China inviting me to take part in a Tea Bowl Exhibition in Fuzhou, China, all expenses paid!

Be careful what you wish for!

How could I say No? Not only that, but I had recently been appointed as an external supervisor to a PhD student studying at the The Australian National University in Canberra, who is researching the origins of the southern oil spot tenmoku tradition of glazes in China. He wanted me to meet him in China and to undertake a research trip to the original sites. This hadn’t worked out last year, but now was perfect timing for such an investigation.

We set about planning it all. After the exhibition was over, a week in Jingdezhen for me to do my porcelain research and then a week in Jian to do the tenmoku research. It all fell into place in a week!

Then a shock message that the exhibition had been cancelled. Such a shame! But I had made other plans and was primed to carry them all out. I decided to go anyway, pay my own ticket and my colleague was also suitably inclined. We’d done all the prep and made all the other bookings, so we decided to go anyway, We had made lots of connections and arrangements, So off we go.

We fly into Beijing and wait for our connection to Jingdezhen. Beijing is a very large airport. I suppose that I’m looking at a post-olympic, trophy, prestige building, meant to impress and it does! While wandering around the airport looking for the domestic terminal sign, I see this sign, that tells me that I am here!. So helpful! I already know that I’m here. I just don’t know where ‘here’ actually is. This terminal is over a kilometre long. I need to know where here is, in regard to everything else and as the sign has no reference to any map, it is just about useless.

you are here!

We arrive in Jingdezhen and make our way to the hostel that will be our home for the next week or so. The first thing that we do is to check out the surroundings and get our bearings. It’s been a decade since I was last there working and a lot has changed in that time. Ten years ago, this part of the city was all two-story, old buildings. Now there are so many astonishingly tall, high-rise apartments creeping out from the city into the suburbs. My old view from the back balcony of my flat, that I shared with quite a few factory workers at that time, has completely changed. I find it hard to recognise much. Slowly I re-familiarise myself with the old laneways and paths and get my bearings.

My old house, where I lived ten years ago, with the upstairs, roof-top balcony, that was actually the kitchen and bathroom area,

In 2005 I could just walk out onto the main street outside the pottery precinct gate and find any number of little street-food kitchens set up and cooking an amazing range of delicious street food. I could go to a different little mobile kitchen, based on a bicycle or possibly a tricycle every morning and never repeat myself and never get more than a few hundred metres from home. I love the food in China. In this part of China the food tradition is of the hot and spicy kind. Every meal seems to be cooked with chilli, even breakfast. I love it!

Chilli in breakfast, lunch and dinner, grits and jowls and bit of bowels, with steamed greens. Yum!

In those days, all the old homes didn’t really have kitchens and bathrooms as we understand the terms. Often, the sink was out in the laneway and shared with 2 or three other houses. The only cooking facility available to most people in those old dwellings at that time was a pressed coal dust briquette, that was lit in a small circular stove, possibly a recycled 20 litre vegetable oil tin. This contraption would take one pot on top and burn for a very long time, possibly an hour or more. No one would get up and light a full briquette in the morning to boil an egg or make a cup of tea and leave the stove burning in an unattended house. such a waste of money and heat, and possibly dangerous too!

These briquettes are made from low-grade coal with lots of clay in it. This poor cool is powdered and then pressed into a circular block with extruded holes through it to help it burn efficiently. when its spent and all the coal is burnt out, what is left is a soft, bisque fried clay block. Out in the street there was a steady stream of working men and women stopping off on their way to work to buy a few hot dumplings or a steamed bun. They were usually riding bicycles or possibly motor scooters. There wasn’t a peak hour in those days, as there weren’t so many cars and the cars that there were, were all fairly small and compact copies of Japanese ‘bongo’ vans. The miniature brick on wheels design.

Well everything has changed. There is a peak hour now! There are loads of new cars on the street and they are big ones, just like our standard family sedans. Loads of them and they are so big. It’s hard to find many bicycles any more, even motor cycles and motor scooters have almost been phased out in favour of silent, clean electric motor scooters. A lot of people live in modern high-rise now with conventional western kitchens and bathrooms. They have electricity for micro waves and electric jugs. People can cook their own tea and dumplings, or noodles before driving off to work in their car. All this convenience, has meant the disappearance of many of the street food sellers. They are still there, but in little clusters in off-road open spaces. We were able to find a different place to eat each morning, but some were so well hidden off the beaten track, that we wouldn’t have found them without being tipped off to their location. (A little like Canberra really!)

All the old industrial high-rise is being replaced with new high-rise.

This place is in the midst a very severe period of renewal and change. Most people seem to be looking prosperous and happy There are innumerable little private workshops springing up everywhere. Wherever there is an old empty building, someone has moved in and done it up and it’s now a shop out front and a workspace out the back. Ten years ago, these buildings were mostly empty or just used for storage.

We set to work the next morning and I make 40 bowls on the small pot boards available to me. I make 4 different shapes. I get them out into the sun hoping to be able to start turning them as soon as possible. We are here in the rainy season, so things are slow to dry, but I get most of them over onto their rims by evening. I don’t have the luxury of a slow, even, controlled drying. The next morning I start to turn the forms so as to rough out the forms to reduce the weight at the base and speed the drying. These one-stone porcelain bodies are quite non-plastic, but I must say that this particular one is very good compared to my own ball-milled ‘Joadja’, ground stone body back at home. The difference being that where as mine is made from a hard, glassy, dense ‘aplite’ or fast cooled granite-like material. This material here in Jingdezhen is a weathered sericite mica and develops a lot more plasticity. Even so, you can’t turn bodies like this when they are leather hard. They just chip and tear. These ‘clays’ , if it’s possible to call them that, need to be molly-coddled a bit and turning is best done at the almost bone dry stage. This allows a better smoother finish, but creates a lot of dust. In Japan, they use a vacuum fan in front of the wheel to create a negative pressure to remove the dust for the workers safety. Here there is no such concern. OH&S is a distinctly ‘western’ luxury concept at work.

I finish all the turning and get them all out into the sun to dry on the third day. I cull them all down to 20, then another cull down to 12. That is all I will be able to carry out on the plane in my back pack. We plan to raw glaze them tomorrow and then into the stoneware kiln the next day, fired over night and unpacked the next morning. We are due to fly out at lunch time. We are cutting it fine, but it is doable. And we do it. It all runs like a Swiss watch. We are greatly aided by Liu Danyun, The daughter of Master Liu, the owner of the Fragrant Garden International Ceramics Studio, she is most helpful in every way and does all our translating, phone calls, bookings and other organising for us. She is a wonderful friend !

Although there has been enormous change over the ten years since I first came here, with so many technological advances, Some things haven’t changed very much. Pots are still moved from studio to studio and studio to kiln on wheel barrows, but change is catching up there too! Not very many studios have their own kiln, most places still use the public kilns, and there are quite a few to choose from in the pottery precinct. You probably don’t have to move your work more than 100 metres to find a kiln to fire them, a glaze workshop to glaze them, a box maker to fit them or a crate maker to package them securely for transport.

Although they now have sophisticated spray booths, and the use of dust masks is more common. They don’t always were the mask or turn on the fan and water pump!

The privately owned and run kiln firing services are amazing. These kilns are packed and fired every day, with one trolley being packed while the other is in the kiln firing. They seem to crack the door open at very hight temperatures, even while there is still a decent, strong, bright glow in the kiln, so as to crash cool it.

Where ever you go there are pots stacked out on the street to catch the breeze and some sunshine to speed up the drying. The pavement is also used as additional studio space in fine weather. Even the street and train line is used as extra workshop drying areas. Nothing is wasted!

I’m quite in awe of these people’s ability for hard work, creativity and efficiency in some very difficult circumstances. It’s such an inspiring environment. I don’t want to come and live and work like this permanently, but I’m so very grateful that I have the chance to come and work here on these occasions and experience this life. It grounds me and makes me realise how lucky I am.

Best wishes

from Steve in Jingdezhen

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