Death in Furnace

Posted on 22/11/2016 by hotnsticky

All Good Things Come to an End.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally the light goes out.

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

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

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

Best wishes
Steve

Winsome, Loose Some

Posted on 25/10/2016 by hotnsticky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashes to ashes and lust to lust
Steve and Janine

Be Prepared

Posted on 21/10/2016 by hotnsticky

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes

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

Hit The Ground Running

Posted on 12/10/2016 by hotnsticky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the moment.

Delivering a Kiln, What Could Possibly go Wrong?

Posted on 04/07/2016 by hotnsticky

I have just finished refurbishing an old 2nd hand kiln for a friend. It’s one that I built 20 years ago and although has suffered some neglect. It is in remarkably good condition. We delivered it to our friend in some very inclement weather. Fortunately the sleet cleared just before we arrived and the frost and ice was melted by the steady drizzle that set in, so the drive was uneventful. The driveway into the property was a bit wet and mushy after all the rain, so it was a slippery slidey reverse up the wet grassy driveway and up onto the concrete slab.

As we are way out into the country side here, there are no facilities to call on. Any sort of assistance would have to come a long way and at great expense. So we are on our own. Two ladies and me.

So, if all goes well, it should only be a matter of lifting the kiln up off the truck and then driving away. What could possibly go wrong? The kiln should then be able to be gently lowered down into the exact position on the slab. A builder has been commissioned to come along later and build a garden shed over to the top of the kiln in-situ.

I think that I have thought of everything. I have lifting gear, slings, chains, shackles, gloves, pallet truck and crow bar. All the parts to built a tripod and a chain block to do the lifting.

Amazingly, it all goes exactly to plan. The rain stops. I take the wooden poles off the truck and build the tripod, walking each leg inwards towards the centre, raising the chin block to a height, high enough to clear the kiln when it is on the back of the ute.

I manage to position the truck with the kiln on the back, more or less in the correct position on the site. Directly under the centre of the tripod and we are ready to lift.

This technique only works on soil or gravel. I have learnt from bitter experience that the legs of the tripod tend to slide outwards from the centre as soon as the load is applied, when they are sitting on concrete, or other flat , smooth surface. On soil, then settle in and dig down, locking them firmly in place. My only concern here is that the soil is so saturated, that they may just keep on sinking in. The soil is absolutely saturated here.

I try a slight test of the gear. The chain block takes the weight and the tripod settles in. I lift a little bit more and the ute raises up on its springs. A little bit more and the kiln starts to move a little and swing to one side a fraction as the weight comes off the legs. Finally its hanging free in mid-air. Just as it’s supposed to, success! While I steady the kiln and keep a hand on the lifting chain. The Lovely releases the hand brake and the ute suddenly zooms off….!

We are all a bit surprised at the speed. The slope was sufficient to allow the truck to freewheel away quite fast. Without the engine running, the power assisted braking doesn’t work and Janine had to press very hard on the truck’s brake pedal to bring the ute to a stop. Nothing went wrong, but no matter how much planning you do, there is always something else that you haven’t considered.

We wrap the kiln and I load all the gear back onto the truck just as the rain returns.

Perfect!

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.

Back From The Mountain

Posted on 17/05/2016 by hotnsticky

We spend a bit of time looking closely at the Nabeshima pots on display, and it is true that there is very little texture in the pale blue gosu, natural cobalt ore, background pigment.

We make our way back down the mountain past the noborigama kilns and other pottery workshops and display rooms. As it has been raining for a day or two, the stream is running quite noisily. Our guide, Tsuru san is very knowledgeable about the ceramic history of this area. Born and bred here, she knows more than we can take in.

The water driven clay crushing hammers are working hard, unattended, pounding the soft porcelain stone to powder all through the day and night without a power bill.

The fish seem unperturbed.

From Okawachi, we drive to another interesting site of early Arita porcelain development. We go to visit the re-constructed Korean climbing that is said to be the one used by the originator of the porcelain industry here, Li Sampei or Ri Sam Pei.

Its a magnificent kiln stretching all the way to the top of the hill, with a slight bend in it to suit the lay of the land form, just as the original one did, as excavated by the archeologists.

On our way home, we call in to visit the Rice Field Potters Kiln. Unsurprisingly, it is set in the middle of some rice fields on a gentle side slope. It has also been reconstructed recently from the information gleaned from an archeological dig on the site. This kiln dates from the time when potters didn’t work full time, but fitted their firings into the rhythm of the season along with rice and vegetable farming. They were the original self-reliant potters.

I really love the way that this old kiln wriggles and snakes its way up the slope. If I were a self-reliant, wood-firing gardener/potter, I’d love to own a kiln like this one. Come to think of it. I am, and I do!

Both of these kilns were built with dog-legs in them to follow the natural surface contours of the local terrain. They are both used intermittently by the local potters groups to keep them working and alive.

It’s been a long day and we have just enough energy left to visit the local sake brewery for a tasting. I can’t decide which one is best, so I am forced to taste them all before I can decide. A total lack of knowledge about sake can be an advantage sometimes?

A Trip to the Mountain

Posted on 15/05/2016 by hotnsticky

We are taken on an excursion to the mountains. It’s a foggy moist kind of day with intermittent rain showers. On the way we pass a really obvious white pegmatite dyke in the side of one of the hills near the road. I’m keen to stop and look, but it appears to be on private land and there is no easy access to it. We drive into a trucking company’s yard to get a closer look, but it is still a bit too far away and it is raining. I don’t fancy bush bashing in my good ‘going out’ clothes. So we let it pass for today. I may try to come back here if there is time on a fine day.

We press on over the mountain top, past a very pretty water fall. Yesterdays rain has brought it to life today. It wasn’t flowing like this the last time that I was here.

We go to Okawachiyama for a 2nd visit. I don’t mind, I’ve been here before, but Janine hasn’t. It’s a pretty place and there is always more to see. You can’t see everything on one visit. There are still lots of lanes and little walkways to explore. This remote valley once housed the Nabeshima Clans’ potters. They were held here in captivity to create the finest, whitest, polychrome enamelled porcelain. They managed to find the whitest of materials and restrict their use for the shogunate only. The creamy white clay glaze combination that they created is still a wonder to this day. It’s purity and translucency is just remarkable. I went on a geology tour of the local porcelain stone sites last week with Kanaiwa san. We visited many places around this district, but we couldn’t find the lost kaolin mine of the Nabeshimas. Kanaiwa san has made a life long study of the ‘nigoshide’ white effect. He has managed to make a modern synthesised version using 3 of the local varieties of porcelain stones. I don’t know his technique, but his knowledge of froth flotation technique that be came obvious to me during one of our early conversations, leads me to believe that there might be some fertile ground there for experimentation. I have certainly found it an essential way to remove iron from otherwise ‘dirty’ rock samples back home in Australia.

On our walk up the steep Okawachiyama Valley road, we call in to see one of the last ladies that can do the seamless cobalt background brushwork. It is a very difficult technique and is now almost lost. These days this kind of background is either sprayed on, or transfer printed. Of those who still hand paint the ‘gosu’ cobalt blue background. and there are only a few of these left as well, the technique used these days is to gently squeeze the ‘fude’, pronounced ‘foo-day’, brush to control the flow of the gosu pigment and loop the brush tip back and forth, producing a layered, slightly overlapping, background pattern. The Nabeshima technique used here is to hold the brush by the handle, not the hair, so no squeezing is used, They tilt the brush, up and down, to control the flow of the pigment. It is a truly astonishing technique.

Traveling South to Kyushu

Posted on 07/05/2016 by hotnsticky

We say a temporary good-bye to Kyoto with its cherry blossoms all finishing up. Mostly on the ground. Its raked gravel gardens and Maiko make-over girls. We’ll be back, we always seem t find an excuse to return here.

We take the long train ride south to Kyushu. We leave Kyoto, and after a while the concrete high-rise scenery starts to diminish slightly and is replaced with low-rise. After a very long while we realise that the buildings are far less common and there is farm land starting to appear. It’s not that there isn’t any farmland near the bigger cities. There is a small, very small, plot of rice being farmed only 1 kilometre from Kyoto’s main central station. Amazing!

As we rumble on, we pass through farming districts and extensive fields of golden crops already for harvest with their heads golden of bearded barley ripening in the sun. I can’t imagine that harvest time for these crops is very far off.

We also see farmers out in the flooded fields with their mini tractors and rotary hoes, working up the inundated mud, presumably preparing the silt for the coming planting of the rice crop. Ploughing now, if you can call this ploughing, is to kill off the weeds and any competition for the young rice seedlings that will be planted soon.

A field of purple vetch. A nitrogen fixing plant used as green manure to organically enrich the soil.

A small vegetable garden in the middle of some rice fields

When I was last here 6 months ago, they were smack in the middle of rice harvest in the autumn. We arrive in the far south in Kyushu, not too far from Kumamoto, about an hour away. Everything here is OK, different strata or geological sequence? We only had a level 2 shake up here. So the kilns are still standing and all the pots are still on their shelves.

It’s all foggy, rainy and damp when we arrive and the hills are coated in a beautiful mist.

Our first visit here is to a place near Karatsu on the North West coast. We visit an old pottery studio that has existed in this little secluded valley for a couple of hundred years. The old lady tells us that her family have always been potters here since the arrival of the Korean potters 400 years ago. The war Lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched 2 failed invasions of Korea in 1592 and 98. Each time he captured and brought back prisoners of war. Some of whom were potters. One in particular found and developed the first porcelain pottery in Japan in 1616. Exactly four hundred years ago this week.

She is a sweet old thing and at 83, has seen a bit of life. Her son is now the resident potter here. She tells us that there were once 300 houses in this valley, most of them making pottery and farming rice and vegetables. Now there are only 5 houses here and only one potter.

They are in the middle of packing the kiln when we arrive. It’s a well-loved old nobori-gama wood fired, 3 chambered climbing kiln.

They pack the pots on rice husks to stop them sticking to the kiln shelf during firing, as rice husk is composed mostly of silica, which is refractory. It also creates a shiny ‘flash’ of colour on the exposed clay at the foot of the pots.

Later, we travel home to Arita via the ‘Hitakata’ ancient kiln site. This little valley once had a number of korean potter families working and farming here. But they are all gone now and only the archaeology remains. This site has been fenced off now to stop looters from stripping the site of old artefacts.

It was one of the first Korean kilns built here way back in the late 1500’s. It is set in a beautiful forested glade with a small but fast flowing stream nearby. Quite idyllic! This kiln was built without the use of fire bricks. It was constructed out of rammed earth. The local soil here doesn’t look particularly refractory, so it probably had a short life and needed to be rebuilt often.

I can’t read the Japanese on the information board, but the illustration shows 9 steps or doorways into the tunnel-like chamber. My teacher back in 1973, the Japanese potter Shiga shigeo, to whom I was apprenticed, trained near Kyoto after the war and his teacher, Saburo Saito had a 3 chambered climbing kiln, all made from rammed local refractory clay and home-made bricks. I was told that the fire-box needed rebuilding after every firing and the first chamber arch was likewise re-built after every 2nd or 3rd firing. This was the traditional way back them and is still used by some potters even today, if they are keen on reproducing the old effects.

Janine and I made all of our own fire bricks to build our wood fired kiln. The current kiln has had twenty firings and is still going strong. However the time will come when it needs to be pulled down and rebuilt.

Such is the way of the world.

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

Fond regards from Steve and Janine in the shaky isle of Kyushu.

Free Fuel

Posted on 16/04/2016 by hotnsticky

It’s dark and quiet. I’m here alone in the very late night, or very early morning. I’m in the kiln shed firing our wood fired kiln. It’s not 5 am yet and I’ve started our 8th wood firing for this year. We can’t start our firings too soon in the year, as there is a fire ban in place until the end of March or sometimes April, depending on the year and the state of the forest and the immediate past rainfall. I have fired our kilns during the summer in years gone by. But only after a good fall of rain, when the fire danger is reduced to low/medium risk. When the bushland all around is wet, there is no chance of my kiln starting a fire. If I want to fire over the summer period. I pack the kiln and seal it up, then wait for rain. It can take a month or more, but I can’t take any risks when there is a fire danger.

We are firing the mid-sized kiln of 1.25 cu. m. We don’t fire the big kiln anymore. At 4.6 cu. m. it is just too big for us now and the amount of pottery sales that we can make these days. We have found that it is better for us to fire the this kiln more often and get all our tests through in reasonable time so that I can continue my research into my local raw materials, especially the development of my single stone porcelain bodies and glazes. Now that we have a reliable small wood kiln that can fire our tests in at any time, it just takes 3 hours, this will make our testing and research regime a lot easier. As the night marches on relentlessly into the early dawn, the birds start carolling, mostly magpies by the sound of it. They just love the dawn and make a big fuss about it. Dawn seems to be some time after 5 am when it is still quite dark, and before 6 am, when I can switch off the light and make entries into the kiln log without needing the light on. The birds are carolling madly now as it gets lighter in the eastern sky. It’s a tremendously beautiful sound, so gentle and lulling. It’s like some pure form of happiness made audible. It’s infectious. I feel happy! Why are they so infectiously happy? Are they celebrating the fact that they are still alive and not eaten during the night by some predator?

In this unique firing, I’m burning a type of timber that I don’t know anything about. I’ve been given a dead tree by the local tree-lopper guy. I don’t know what sort of tree it is, as it has no leaves or bark, but I know that it is not something that I have come across before. This is nothing unusual, because there are thousands of different tree species and as a rule, I only burn the local trees from around here. Mostly trees that Janine and I have grown here on our 7 acres of highland sclerophyll forest over the years. However, because I’ve lived in this little hamlet here for over 40 years. I have met a lot of people and they know that I have a wood fired kiln, so every now and then someone turns up with an offer of free wood for the kiln, just to get rid of it and not have to pay the dumping fee at the local council recycling centre, which is also located at the other end of the shire and 45 minutes drive away and is quite a drive. We are located at the opposite end of the shire from the recycling centre.

What I do know about this dead tree is that it is interesting. It is quite light in weight like a soft wood such as pine, but it has a strange twisted, interlocking grain like a hard wood such as a eucalypt. It turns out to be quite hard to split, even using the hydraulic splitter. It’s quite a tough wood. I’m hoping that it will burn well. But this is not knowable in advance until I actually get it into the fire box and see what happens over time. I have a lot of wood already cut, split and stacked ready for firing. I have several stacks, each about enough for a firing. I have stringybark, paperbark, ironbark and she oak all ready and prepared as well as a firings worth of radiata pine, from a load of trees brought here by a local contractor who was asked to clear a building block to make a house site. I naively said “yes. Bring the trees here, sure, I’ll take them”!

It turned out to be 8 truck loads in his 8 tonne truck. He had more, but I just ran out of space to dump it safely. He kindly sawed off the root ball, de-limbed them all and cut them to the 6 metre length of his tipper tray so that they would stack and carry efficiently. I have no way to know if each load was the full 8 tonnes or not, but it surely was a very large pile of logs by the time the last load was dumped here. It took up all of my wood storage space and then some. I could hardly move the ute and wood splitter around. I simply had to start at the far end and whittle away at the pile until I could make a space large enough to turn around in. Then I worked my way cutting and splitting all the way up one side to clear the driveway, back up to the road. I have been working my way through this huge 1/4 acre pile of trees for a while now and there is still a big pile of logs left to work through.

These logs are free fuel. Something not to be sneezed at in these days of increasing energy prices, but only free as long as you already have a spare 1/4 acre of forest clearing, a couple of chain saws, a tractor to drag the piles apart safely, a hydraulic wood splitter and a ute to transport the cut wood around, and then a wood shed to keep it all dry once it is cut and split to be stored and seasoned, then, ultimately I can burn it for “free”!

This firing has a lot of tests in it, as all my firings do. If I don’t have time to make some new tests and follow-up on new ideas. I feel like there is something wrong, something missing. After a lifetime of potting. It’s 48 years now since I got to throw my first pot on the potters wheel and was hooked. Any firing without tests in it is an empty firing. It’s the test pieces. The promise of something new revealed, that makes the unpacking extra special and not just plain mechanical work. It is the stimulus of expectation that makes the difference. I know that I should be aware of my all too human failing of expectation, just observe it and let it pass, but it just hangs around until I see those tests. As it often turns out, they are not very special, but every once in a while there is something interesting that makes it all so much more rewarding and worth while. It’s probably something like a kind of addiction. Hanging out for that next hit of pleasure, that next intellectual/aesthetic indulgence. It can just be a test ring or a shard. The object itself isn’t all that important, it’s the internal machinations and the thought processes that it provokes.

I have 10 new body pastes in this firing, but so as to keep it all under control. I am using all my reliable and well-tested rock glazes on them. Glazes that have proved to be suitably stable and beautiful. I can’t afford to use unknown bodies with unknown glazes on them. That would be asking for trouble. I have set up a system where I am testing each of the 10 new porcelain body recipes with each of my 10 rock glazes. Each new clay recipe/variation glazed with 10 well-known glazes. A hundred bowls in all. This should reveal something. I don’t know quite what yet, but I’m keen to find out. Even if there is nothing special or ’showable’ it’ll still be something to cross off as not worthwhile, so then I can work on something completely different. I suspect though, that there will be something in there. I just don’t know which one. This firing hopefully will reveal the best, or most likely contender for further refinement.

I’d like eventually, to be able to make something that is both meaningful and beautiful — on a shoestring

All will be revealed in a few days.

This is the life of a frugal self-reliant potter. Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect, nothing lasts.

Its just like a good salad!