We’ve been busy in the clay making shed loading up the dough mixer with more clay mixtures for the coming throwing weekend workshops booked for the 26th and 27th of this month.  This time I made up a single batch each of vitreous white stoneware/porcelaneous body and a batch of coarse, wood firing, stoneware body using local rough crushed shale with both pale and brown kaolin powders.

We use the stainless steel twin auger Venco pug mill that I bought 2nd hand. It’s only small with a  3”, or 75mm dia, extrusion, but it is so quick, very quiet and self feeding. 

We started by recycling all the slaked and stiffened turnings from the last batch that had been sitting in the clay box ageing and waiting for the next pugging session.

Over the few months since I used it last, the clay had dried out a little in places in the barrel. Which was a little bit strange, as I had the pug mill pretty well sealed at both ends, but some of the clay dried out enough to be too firm to pass through the vacuum screen. It jammed in the screen mesh and slowed down the pugging significantly, so I had to pull the pug to bits and clean the screen. No problem! The beautiful feature of this pug mill, is that it only takes 60 seconds to rotate and un-clip the barrel, then lift it off to get to the screen. It’s so quick and easy with no bolts or spanners required. I scraped the screen clean and replaced it in 2 mins and back in business. Amazing!

The next batch of coarse textured wood firing clay was put through the dough mixer and the Venco 4” or 100 mm. dia. vacuum pug mill. This pug mill is fitted with coarse mesh vacuum screens, specifically for making clay bodies like this.

We start off by pugging all the recycled turnings from the last throwing session. These have been wet processed, bagged and then stored in the clay boxes waiting for the next pugging session with this mill. By having different pug mills for each different clay body. It saves so much time in not having to clean out the pug mill before changing clays. The recycled turnings also benefit by the time spent ageing in the clay box, increasing in plasticity over time. The new batch of clay is loaded onto the mobile clay table and wheeled out of the isolated and dust extracted mixer room, then wheeled out to the pug mill area. Janine can then start to pug the clay in a clean, dust free environment, while I return to the clay mixer room and start another batch.

The recycled clay and the new batch are then pugged together to get a good mix. But most importantly, all the pugged clay is stacked in a long stack on the pug mill bench and when full, all the ends of every pug of clay are all cut off and mixed together, and fed back through the pug mill, so that there is a little bit of every part of the new batch and all the turnings all aggregated in the new sausage of clay as it comes from the pug. This thrice pugged and well blended clay is then bagged and back into the clay store ready for use. This double processing and blending eliminates any variation between the first and last pugs of clay from that mix.

It doesn’t eliminate any mistakes in the weighing out or the dough mixing, but it minimizes the possibilities. Life is what it is.

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

All the machines are built on trollies or castors, so that once all the clay is bagged and stored away, I can then wheel all the machinery out of the way and mop the floor clean of any spilt fragments of clay, dropped while pugging. The whole area is opened up to a through breeze, and thoroughly wet cleaned and mopped, then allowed to dry, before the machinery is wheeled back into place.

It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it is very good and the best that I can do at the moment using the machines that I could get my hands on 2nd hand at the time, and others donated from friends. You know who you are! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and thoughtful kindness!

Since half way through February, I have been back at work in the pottery. I started back by making terracotta slip from dark shale that I have collected and had stored in the barn. The half of the barn that didn’t burn. So that was lucky. I carried water in buckets for several hours to keep the fire under control as it slowly spread. 2 of my 4 pumps failed, so I was left with the only option being to carry buckets from the railway station and throw them onto the burning frame. The fire wasn’t finally extinguished until late in the evening, around dusk, when the first fire truck arrived, seven hours after the fire had passed through. I have no idea what they had been doing for all that time, but they never managed to get to my end of the village until dusk.

So now I am making clay slip to mix with some powdered kaolin so as to make a dark stoneware body. Some of the materials that I collect have a lot of iron in them. So much so, to the point that they melt at stoneware temperatures in reduction. I had to be so careful not to over-fire them, or reduce too heavily in the past. This time round I’m adding kaolin to the mix to strengthen the body so that it will be a lot easier to fire without losses, but every new clay body is a bit of an experiment.

I collected some dark shale from the local brickworks shale pit. I was taken there by a local geologist when we were having a day out together exploring the clay/shale resources of the local shire. He was keen to point out that there is a significant amount of coal embedded in layers within the shale beds at this location. I imagine that it starts to fire itself once it reaches ignition temperature of the coal fraction. They must need to hold temperature and allow plenty of excess air into the kiln to counter ‘black heart’ or bloating?

He pointed out that the carbon content was so high, that if it were just a touch higher, they would have to pay a coal mining royalty to the State Government, instead of just a shale royalty. When milled up it can turn out to be almost black, very dark grey to charcoal colour.

I could just buy black clay from a pottery supply shop like everyone else. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not in my psyche. I love to make everything my self. Even if it is not as good as a bought one. At least it is mine and it is low carbon miles and made entirely with my own hands and on my solar electricity. However, sometimes my own home made stuff actually turns out to be better, certainly more individual and sustainable. So it is much better in my mind.

I only bother to rough crush the shale to allow it to go into the blunger. Then I add plenty of water and blunge it through a first pass of 60 mesh. I take out the harder non-plastic shale particles and they can be ball milled to a finer size. They are the concentrated lumps of coal and iron intimately mixed.  The slip is then passed through the sieve again at 80 mesh to get a fine slip. This is left to flocculate over a few days and then decanted to give a thick slurry. It’s a slow process, so time has to be created to allow for the natural process of flocculation to occur. This is slow clay, not fast convenience clay making, not so much ‘pret-a-porter’ clay, as L’argile-à-porter. 

I also make a coarse textured stoneware from another shale that fires buff to brown, and a finer off-white clay for wood firing that flashes quite nicely given the right firing. All this clay making has been going on since January, interspersed with gardening and fencing work. Important jobs that just had to be done at a certain time and couldn’t be put off.

Finally, three weeks ago I managed to get back on the wheel again. Hurrah!

After the previous pottery burnt down in 1983. I spent a year jack hammering out stone foundations to get a more level site and making mud bricks, then hammering 4 inch nails into hard wood beams to create the new studio. The outcome was a beautiful ‘organic’ pottery workshop made of local natural materials at virtually no cost, but the true cost was the severe damage to my wrists, that still persists to this day if I over do it. I had wanted to make some bigger size pots for some time, but couldn’t throw any large lumps of clay due to my wrist damage, so I taught myself how to hand build on the wheel by the ‘coil-and-throw’ technique. I wasn’t taught by anyone. I had only ever seen it done in pictures, so I had to invent my own way. A few years later, when I was doing a demonstration of my technique to an art school class. One of the students called out. “You’re not doing it right. That’s not how Andrew Halford does it”!  Andrew was a local Sydney potter who had studied in Japan with a big pot throwing master potter. “You’re supposed to drape the coil of clay over your shoulder!”

One of the differences in my invented technique is that I don’t like to use a gas burner to dry my pots in-between the addition of coils. I can see that it is necessary if you want to complete a large pot with multiple coil additions in just one day or even less to fit into a school schedule. I have been forced to do this myself at times. But I don’t like to if I don’t have to. I prefer to let the pot sit over night, often wrapped in plastic, and for the clay to go ’thixotropic’ and ’set’ instead of drying out and shrinking due to applied heat. I think that I get a better, and more continuous form if I do it this way. Of course, I’m no expert, and as I haven’t made any big pots for quite some years before the fire. I do still get some undulations in my forms. That is where the ‘hammer and anvil’ paddling technique comes in handy. It corrects the form, but disturbs the thixotropic set of the clay particles and therefore delays the addition of the next coil for half a day or even over night.

So here I am back on the wheel in a new pottery. I have built and test fired the new wood kiln a few times, albeit with some difficult learning going on due to the nature of my wood. And I’m now ready to make a few big pots again. My wrists are still a bit delicate, so I’m going with coil and throw again. I have to start small, as I have to remember what I had learnt the last time that I did it. I’ve forgotten so much due to the trauma. It seems that my mind has dumped any superfluous information and wiped its hard drive clean, to eliminate traumatic memories and make way for the ongoing cleanup and rebuilding learning and knowledge. Recovering old files takes time it seems, but it is mostly coming back to me. Bit by Bit.

I started with smaller pieces, then worked up to taller narrow forms, as these are easier, and my 2nd hand wheels don’t do so well going really, really slowly, as the drive is a bit worn.

I’ll start to work on a couple of wider forms next week.

So far so good. That’s the easy bit, it’s the firing that will be the big test.