We have had our Hyundai ‘Ioniq’, plug-in electric hybrid car for 6 years now and it has all been a good experience, even better actually, A great experience!
This car has exceeded our expectations. We have settled into a routine with it now. We can drive anywhere locally on the battery, doing our local shopping and social visits very comfortably. If we need to go further afield, no problem, the petrol engine will bring us home.
We always charge at home from our solar PV panels. We have never been to a charging station. We have taken it on longer trips up the Queensland twice and down to Canberra several times. For these trips, we rely on the petrol engine. However, these trips are seldom done and are the exception.
For those interested in facts and figures. My log book tells me that by January 2025, we had traveled 64,000kms and spent a total of $1,860 on fuel. That’s about 34 kms to the dollar, or if petrol is $1.80 per litre, then we are getting about 61 kms to the litre. NOT 6 but 61! Most of that fuel was purchased on those long trips.
We are in the habit of putting $20 to $30 dollars worth of fuel in the car about 4 times a year. When we first purchased it. I filled the tank on the way home, as per normal practice with a new car. Big mistake! It took us almost a year to use up that fuel. It was sitting there going stale in the tank for most of the time. Stale fuel can be a big problem, so we have not done that since, unless we are planning a long trip.
When fully fueled up with a full battery and a full tank. The fuel/trip computer tells me that we can go 1,150 kms!
The Ioniq, is a medium sized car, but is the biggest car that we have ever owned. It’s vast and comfortable compared to the little 3 cylinder Japanese 900 CC Daihatsu, Charade and Sirion, cars that we have had previously. These were very fuel efficient, very tiny, very nippy and could find a tiny parking space anywhere. I like the driving feel of the small cars, but I love driving the Hyundai. It’s so smooth, quiet and comfortable.
We have had no issues with it. Although, maybe just one, when rats are some part of the electrical wiring system. It cost us $600 to find the fault and get it repaired. Not too bad in the scheme of things, as the mechanic told us that several cars that he had looked at and quoted on recently were written off because of the cost of repair from rats eating the wiring loom. We were lucky!
Since then, I have begun opening the bonnet as soon as we get home, and fitting a bright LED light in the engine compartment, fitted with a 24 hour timer, so that is switches on at dusk and off at dawn, all automatically. That makes the engine compartment an unpleasant place to be for a rat. It also allows engine heat to dissipate readily, making it even less hospitable.
I love my plug-in electric car, so much so, that in December I bought a new fully electric Fiat 500e ‘bambino’. That classic little Italian car from the movies. First produced post-war, in the 50’s, and has been in production right through until today. In various models. This brand new electric version is incredibly cute. It can go 300kms on a full charge, which is enough to drive to Sydney and back.
I installed a new 3 phase, 40 amp, charger for it, It just plugs into the already existing 3 phase power socket on the wall in the carport. So I can charge it at home on sunshine. It takes from 3 to 4 hours from empty to fully charge. We can do this overnight from our home ‘powerwall’ batteries, using yesterdays sunshine, or during the day directly from the sun. However, I usually top it up any time there is plenty of sun that we are not getting very much money for when we sell to the grid.
The Fiat only seats 2 realistically, although it has a back seat and 4 seat belts, the back seat is only for child sized passengers. I’ve put the back seats down to double the boot space. So now it’s a two door, two seater hatch.
Its incredibly powerful. The torque is amazing, and can pin you back in your seat. But this is normal for all electric cars. They have loads of torque! It’s the classic small, nippy car that I have always loved to drive, but now I drive on sunshine!
So now, after a couple of months of ownership, I can say that it is fantastic, and does everything that we need to do. However, if I had to do a thousand kilometre drive to Melbourne or Queensland for some reason, I’d take the Hyundai for the long haul comfort and leg room.
We are very pleased to be a fully solar powered household. We can run the House, Pottery, Kilns and 2 cars on our solar. I even got a $350 cheque from the electricity company last week, for all our unused excess. This will reduce in Winter, but so far, we have never paid an electricity bill since 2006/7, when we installed the first solar PV panels.
Even when the fire burnt down our pottery in 2019. With our first PV installation gone, we were without solar for 3 quarters of billing periods. However, we had such a good unclaimed credit on our bill at the time, that we were able to go that whole time just using up our credit. We had new solar panels installed before the end of the year, and we were back on deck before the credit ran out.
Back in 2019, just before the fire destroyed my life. I was commissioned by the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney to create new ceramic work for their collection.
A patron named Mr Willoughby, left his estate to the PowerHouse Museum with instructions that It be used to commission new ceramic and glass works of art for their collection. I was lucky enough to be one of the 6 artists selected to make those works.
I received the commission just before the fire. so I rang the Museum and a offered to return the commission, as I knew that it would take my a long time to re-build my workshop and life, before I could even consider making special new work.
I was a mess after the trauma of fighting the fire, loosing the battle, and running for my life, with my hair on fire, to climb into my kiln and hide in there while the inferno passed over me. That kiln saved my life, but left me shattered. I had no time to de-breif, I started the clean-up operation straight away the next day, and it has never stopped to this day. We are still finishing off the new buildings to make them long term sustainable.
I suffered a lot of Post Traumatic Shock (PTSD) that lasted 4 years, until I could get the correct psychiatric help – EMDR – trauma therapy. I decided to make some new pieces for the Museum collection, that responded to my situation, some 3 years late!
This is downloaded from my artists statement on the Museum’s web site;
Full Artist Statement ‘Self Portrait’ by Steve Harrison
‘I’ve finally completed the commission for the Powerhouse Collection. I was chosen as 1 of the 6 artists to make new work for the collection, as part of the ‘Willoughby Commission’, way back in 2019, just a few weeks before my workshop and studio were destroyed in the 2019 catastrophic bush fires. It has taken me over 3 years to get back on my feet with a functioning creative workspace. I have spent the last 12 months since then assembling this new work. My original thought was to make beautiful porcelain bowls that encapsulated my love of a quiet, gentle and sustainable approach to life and making. But all that was dashed in the fires, when all my lifetime collection of ceramic materials, kilns and buildings were destroyed in just one day. I stayed to defend and save my house but suffered considerable trauma in the process. I have created this new work for the collection to reflect the chaos and destruction that I endured. I decided to work with the many hundreds of shattered pieces of broken pottery that littered the site after the fire. A few pieces were broken but had the potential to be repaired using the ancient Japanese technique of kintsugi – gold repair. These few small bowls, although damaged, had the potential to be recovered with patient attention to detail. Kintsugi expresses a desire to ‘honour’ a damaged, but still lovely object by giving it time to be rebuilt, and eventually to possibly become even more beautiful than before, because of the time and effort spent on it. I spent some months, part-time, cleaning, repairing and re-constructing missing parts of these bowls to make them ‘complete’ again. They are whole again, although different from before. Damaged and altered, changed from what they were, but in some ways ‘enhanced’ and given a lot of love and care, they are somehow more beautiful, but in a completely different way. They became symbols of my journey to recovery. This work of slow repair and enhancement gave me to idea to create new pieces that didn’t previously exist but created from the mixed shards sieved from the ashes of the ruins. Completely new work, but made from a composite of all my old work. It’s been a very slow and tedious job of work, assembling a thousand small, burnt, broken and shattered shards all back together in a new combination to make ‘compendium’ pieces of my life’s work. Each shard needs to be held in place until the glue sets, so only a few shards can be added each day. I’m calling them ‘abstracts’, not because they have any relationship to modern painting, but because an ‘abstract’ is the first part of an academic thesis, which summarises the contents of the entire paper. In this case, these newly constructed vessels comprise many small shards of my work made at different times over my career, mostly sifted from the ashes of the old pottery after the fire, but also containing a few new post fire pieces as well. In this sense they are a summary of my life’s work, presented in a new form. An auto biography, or a ‘self-portrait’ in ceramics perhaps? They contain a small part of every phase of my career from my earliest days here, through to the present. Just as I have rebuilt my shattered and damaged self through a lot of trauma therapy since the fire, I am mostly better, but still carry a bit of lingering damage with me. I’m repaired and reconstructed, but different.
Screenshot
‘Self Portrait 1’ by Steve Harrison
OBJECT NO. 2024/78/1
Harrison has lived and worked in Balmoral Village near Mittagong, in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, for almost 5 decades, pursuing a simple life of self-sufficiency and commitment to his local community. His interest in single-stone hard paste porcelain led to extensive travels and research of porcelain clays and processes in Japan, China, Korea and Britian, building bonds of fellowship with the international potter community. He has intensely explored the regional geology of Mittagong and Joadja Valley, focussing on sericite, and mica-based stones, to create his own clays, glazes and then bowls and jars fired with locally sourced wood or solar-powered electricity. While the forms of the simple vessels he has made over the years have changed, they have all been testaments to his life-long quest for the essence of porcelain clay and delight in the ‘subdued beauty’ of natural materials. Harrison’s vessels have seen many exhibitions at galleries such as the Kim Bonython, Legge and Watters galleries in Sydney and his works are in major Australian galleries and museums. Harrison has often augmented his works of clay with words crafted to express the relationships between the pieces, his life, the history of ceramic art, the state of the world and its fragile environment. ‘Self Portrait 1’ and ‘Self Portrait 2’ were commissioned just before the most severe bush fires of 2019 destroyed his pottery in December that year. A particularly ferocious fire almost claimed Harrison’s life, as it climbed over a thin skin of a makeshift kiln-like shelter assembled a day earlier, a last minute ‘plan B’. These works are entirely unique in Harrison’s creative output, in their concept, circumstances of production and the large scale of ‘Self Portrait 1’. Assembled from surviving fragments and shards of diverse vessels he made during his life as a potter, in Harrison’s own words, they are an ‘abstract’ or ‘compendium’ of his life’s work: ‘This work was commissioned just a few weeks before my workshop and studio were destroyed in the 2019 catastrophic bush fires. It has taken me over 3 years to get back on my feet with a functioning creative workspace. I have spent the last 12 months assembling this new work. My original thought was to make beautiful porcelain bowls that encapsulated my love of a quiet, gentle, and sustainable approach to life and making. But all that was dashed in the fires, when all my lifetime collection of ceramic materials, kilns and buildings were destroyed in just one day. I stayed to defend and saved my house but suffered considerable trauma in the process. I have created this new work to reflect the chaos and destruction that I endured. I worked with the many hundreds of shattered pieces of broken pottery that littered the site after the fire…to make ‘compendium’ pieces of my life’s work… an auto biography, or a ‘self-portrait’ in ceramics…Just as I have rebuilt my shattered and damaged self through a lot of trauma therapy since the fire, I am mostly better, but still carry a bit of lingering damage with me. I’m repaired and reconstructed, but different.’ [1] Born of a natural disaster that has changed Harrison’s life irrevocably, the three jars and five bowls in the two complementary installations are extraordinary assertions of the truth Harrison saw in Bernard Leach’s belief that pottery and its traditions are a part of our cross-cultural inheritance, an expression of the hidden potential in our clays and rocks, and an essential avenue to a unity of life and beauty. Within this context, ‘Self Portrait 1’ and ‘Self Portrait 2’ offer the story of Steve Harrison’s remarkable life positioned between a self-professed idyl of a ‘modern peasant’ and destruction, between beauty and ugliness; together they stand as a powerful poem written in clay about his, and our, place in the world, and ultimately, his hymn to survival.
The second workshop on the 11th to the 13th of January is also now FULL
I have started a new waiting list for a third workshop for sometime early in February, yet to be determined. I already have 3 names, but need 8 to run the course.
Janine, Len Smith and I will be offering a 3 day throwing workshop over the summer break. Jan 6th to 8th.
We will be teaching throwing techniques for beginners and intermediate level, aimed at making larger forms.
This is NOT a Masterclass for advanced throwers. This workshop is aimed at beginner to intermediate level.
You will need to be able to center clay on the wheel, from there on we will help you make some larger forms, demonstrating exercises to give you confidence to tackle slightly larger projects. Progressing from whatever your current level of skill is.
I will be demonstrating a series of techniques such as top hatting and coil and throw building techniques.
We will also be demonstrating construction techniques, assembling your thrown sections together to build slightly more complex or larger pieces. We will help you work at your own pace to gain confidence and increase the complexity of your forms, or the height and scale of your pots, as you choose.
The workshop runs for three days from 10 till 4pm on Monday 6th of January to Wednesday 8th of January.
Clay is provided, you will need to bring your throwing tools and lots of batts, a dozen or more. If you own an electrical heat gun, you can bring it along with your tools.
Tea and coffee are provided, please bring something to share for lunch.
Numbers are Limited, as we only have 8 wheels in the studio. First in best dressed.
Cost $375 for three days. Enrollment is confirmed after payment is made.
This weekend is the Australian Ceramics Association, Open Studios.
We will be open from 10 to 4 each day.
I have been continuing to work over the past few weeks. In particular, I have been doing some ‘kintsugi’ gold repair on a few of my pots with interesting cracks.
Some 23 carat gold really lifts a slightly damaged pot.
I have also found time to make the weekly loaf of rye bread, and a tray of rock cakes to share with our visitors over the weekend.
We will be open for the next two weekends in November, 16th/17th. for the Southern Highlands Arts Trail then the ACA Open Studios, Ceramics Arts Trail that is happening Nationally on the 4th weekend of the 23rd and 24th of Nov.
We have plenty of pots in the gallery, floral bowls, and Mixing bowls.
Celadon mugs, Floral mugs, Sgraffito mugs and Sgraffito plates.
I have some unglazed, wood fired Tea bowls that I have been fettling and finishing during the week.
And some wood fired porcelain bowls, glazed with traditional blue celadon. This bowl has some carbon inclusion in the exposed body and is quite subtle and very beautiful in a restrained sort of way.
The cherry crop is in full swing just now and we are able to pick a kilo of cherries every few days. We had bowls full of cherries on offer to our visitors last weekend.
As we have eaten our fill of fresh cherries, during the week I made home made cherry pie and cherry tarts – because I can!
This is the only week of the year when we can do this. So I make an effort and do it. What else are evenings for?
The recipe optimistically said that it takes 15mins to de-pip a kilo of cherries. It too Janine and I 30 mins. 4 times longer, but worth it. Nothing worse than biting into a delicious looking cherry tart and breaking a tooth on a rouge cherry stone.
I made the recipe with only half the sugar and it is just about right for my taste. I made an almond short crust pastry, quite a bit of fiddling around, but the end result is vaguely sweet, pleasantly soft and slightly crunchy.
I had to go to the workshop and make a dozen stainless steel tart rings. I found a little piece of stainless off-cut, sliced it up in to strips and spot welded them together into small 60 x 20 mm tart rings. Waste not, want not.
Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished, and nothing lasts forever.
Because the kiln shed wasn’t finished on time, the team of 8 professional kiln builders that are contracted to build the massive North Korean designed 5 chamber kiln that is going in the new shed next to mine, are all sitting with nothing to do for a couple of days, as the slab for their kiln hasn’t even been cast yet. The slab for my kiln was cast the day before I arrived, but as they were still finishing the roof of the shed I wasn’t allowed on site because of the danger of falling objects. So nothing happened for the first day for any of us. We all went into the nearest big town half an hour away to buy groceries for the coming week.
There is almost nothing fresh available here in this little village. There is a junk food ‘convenience store’ that mostly sells soft-drinks, tinned coffee, beer and cigarettes, and a very small ’supermarket’ where you can drop off the first word and buy dried and canned foods that aren’t particularly super in degree or range.
No one sells fresh vegetables, and understandably so, as everyone here, with exception of the dozen museum staff and research students, is involved in farming vegetables. I suppose that they either grow what they need themselves, or swap with neighbours who do. Either way there is nothing fresh in the two tiny shops here.
In the bigger nearby town of Yanggu, there is a choice of bigger grocery shops and one real supermarket. We travel there and get a weeks supply of almost everything that we can think of, that we might need to feed ourselves for the coming week. We spend about $700 on these 3 trolleys of various food items. It even includes shoju and beer! I notice that they sell red wine in there. So return by myself while the others are loading the cars, and buy 4 bottles of red wine, mostly of cheaper origins like Chilean and South Africa There is nothing from Australia available.
I don’t enjoy shoju at all, but quite like the fermented rice wine called makoli and the local beer, but I feel that there might be an occasion when there will be an opportunity to share some claret in the coming evenings together. It turns out that I’m spot on with this decision. The bottle doesn’t go very far when shared 9 ways!
The first day of brick laying, with many helpers goes really fast and I lay out the parameters for the design and using a string line and plumb bob weight, I make sure that the chimney will be directly below the roof opening. This laying out is the slowest part of kiln building. Getting everything square and level before we start.
Many hands make light work and we lay the two floor layers in record time. I introduce these Korean professional kiln builders to ‘herring bone’ pattern floor bricklaying technique. They don’t seem to recognise what I’m doing, but using my phone and a translation app, I explain it to them as best that I can, and one of them googles/navers it and announces that it is called herring bone, and they all nod approval, discussing it in detail in Korean chatter as we work. This pattern helps to avoid any straight through cracks developing from left to right or front to back as the kiln shifts and moves as it expands and contracts during its firings.
2 days later, I notice that they have decided to use it in the base pattern of brickwork of their kiln foundations as well!
I get this unexpected extra manpower help with my brickwork, as the slab for the big kiln next door is not yet cast. In fact, the local builders are still relocating soil for the earth ramp of the man-made slope and then framing the formwork for the slab. Unbelievably, they get the freshly tamped earth roughly level and tamped down, then all framed-up with formwork and the cement cast by late in the afternoon. I’m pretty amazed by this fast work. However, I do notice that there is no steel mesh used in the slabs, and with it cast on top of freshly placed earth substrate, Will it crack in due course? I have no idea, but hope for the best. These Korean workers sure are fast. Going on this, I can only suppose that there is no steel in my slab either.
I am working flat out, as fast as I can to lay down bricks in their final positions to be laid with mortar seconds later, by one of my several helpers. They are professionals and are so quick. I’m hoping that I don’t make any mistakes working at this speed, as there is no room for any error. It gets particularly stressful when I have to lay out all the mouse holes and tertiary air inlets in under the floor and in the first layer of the walls. They need to be precisely positioned to work effectively, and I have no time to second guess if they are exactly right or not. working with four bricklayers calling for bricks keeps me thinking of four different parts of the kiln at once. Mouse holes, stoke holes, tertiary air inlets, flue holes and the door openings are all required in this first layer, and all at the same time. I’m used to working at a much slower pace and thinking everything through thoroughly. There is no time to think here at this speed. Luckily, I’ve done this before a time or two, so everything goes well.
By the end of the second day, we have the walls well and truely started and up a few courses. I have the luxury of having two of these enthusiastic helpers dedicated to using both of the diamond saws, cutting the hard fire bricks to special sizes to facilities the special openings that I need for the tertiary air inlets. These guys have never seen a kiln like this one with so many holes in it. Traditional wood kilns here are very basic in their construction, often, just straight through tunnels, or multiple chambers, one after the other with only the flue holes to think about. They keep asking me how it will all work, and I am at a loss to be able to explain the intricacies of the design to them with my limited Korean and just some charades to do the explaining. It will have to wait until dinner time, when I can get out my lap top and show them some images of finished examples. Everyone here has a phone with a translation app. I’m constantly turning round to face a phone screen to talk into, to give yet another explanation of a detail in the brick laying pattern.
I briefly have these 7 blokes on my team, and there is just one bloke stripping the form work and measuring the step dimensions and figuring out the layout for the big North Korean designed kiln next door. The cement slab is still fresh, soft and still very wet.
The next day, They are all going flat out on the big kiln, sorting out the necessary steps up the slope and making sure that the first layers will match the brick dimensions needed to align with the next step of brickwork. It’s a massive job. The kiln will have 5 chambers and a huge firebox with two arched openings at the front. They waste no time, and with 8 skilled workers the job flies up.
I am left to work on slowly on my small kiln, with occasional help from one of the bigger kiln team and someone to cart bricks and cut special shapes on the diamond saw when necessary. We work well together, and there is a lot of laughter, good natured banter and good will towards me. At the end of each work session, there are more questions about how it will work. I suspect that they think that I’m a bit mad, or at least quite quirky, expecting the fire to burn up-side-down and not roast my head off as a soon as I open the stoke-hole lid in the top of the fire box. Fire always burns upwards in their experience.
None of them has read my book on downdraught fire box kilns that The Director here of the Research centre has had translated into Korean about 5 or 6 years ago. Not a big seller apparently, among the traditional wood kiln building community?
I ask Mr Jung, The Director of the Porcelain Museum and Research Centre, to bring a copy of the book over to the kiln site, the next time that he visits, he does and it is passed around at morning tea time. A couple of the guys flip through the pages, but I don’t think that any one actually reads it in any detail. After dinner, I get out my lap top and show them images of other projects like this one to help explain what I’m try to achieve.
I build an arch formwork and set it in place on a stack of firebricks, using hand cut special wooden wedges that I place on top to adjust the formwork to the exact level needed, and also to allow me to pull them out and drop the wooden form work down free of the finished brick arch, to allow me to slide the formwork out of the chamber. This excites a little bit of interest in a couple of the bigger team, as they don’t appear to have ever seen this before.
I have read in older books, perhaps Leach’s Potters Book? That they just leave the form work in place in the big oriental kilns and burn it out later, before the first firing. I though that this was a bit wastefull. So I have never done this, always removing the formwork to be used again in another kiln in the future. When I tap out the wedges and drop the form work, there is a little intake of breath and a smile from Mr Kim who is assisting me at the time. He smiles broadly and taps me on the shoulder, thumbs up. He’s impressed. word spreads and my position in the social order rises slightly. At dinner, some one asks me how old I am. I tell them I’m 72, nodding all round. From this time onwards, I’m always ushered through doorways first and given the front seat in the car when we go somewhere. I’m accepted as one of them as a professional kiln builder, but I’m also the oldest member of the team. So as such I garner a little bit of extra respect as well.
I finish the brickwork on my kiln by the end of the week and start to engage with all the multitude of little jobs that are needed to complete the kiln. I need make a load of ceramic buttons to attach the ceramic fibre insulation to the firebox lids. I also need to get a local company to cut and fold some thin stainless steel sheet to make the fire box lids.
I ask to be given a lift into the bigger nearby town of Yanggu, to buy steel angle iron and round bar to weld on the bracing. It all goes pretty smoothly, and in a couple of days the kiln is all braced in steel. Using a little portable stick welder I slowly work my way around the kiln, cutting and fitting the pieces together. I haven’t used a stick welder for 20 years. I’m a bit rusty on it, but it soon comes back to me. I’ve only used much more modern MIG and TIG welders in my kiln business for the past couple of decades. I have been spoilt by their speed and convenience, but I manage.
In some miraculous way, I manage to weld the 10mm dia. steel rod handles onto the 0.8mm. thick, or should I say thin, stainless steel sheet lids, using the little stick welder. This isn’t normally possible. The heat needed to melt the 10mm steel handle, is far too hot for the thin sheet and would normally burn a hole clean through the thin sheet. I’m aware of this, so prefabricate a small piece of angle iron backing plate that I clamp inside the lid to absorb most of this excess heat. I do burn a couple of small holes through here and there, but mostly it works well and I get the impossible done before lunch. More kudos from the pros on site.
They are treating me as an equal. It’s turning out to be a very good job.
I have always been interested in living gently. All my ceramic work incorporates this philosophy, this respect for the environment. My lifestyle choices include growing my own food, generating my own solar power, collecting my own drinking water, building my own hand-made house from local materials, and growing my own fuel for my kiln. So when it comes to making my work. I choose to make it from locally available materials that I can find around me, in my immediate locality, wherever this is possible. This grounds me in my environment. It also severely limits what I can make, however, this is not a problem, it is an intriguing challenge that engages me on many levels physically, mentally and spiritually. I dig my native ceramic materials locally, within a 50 km radius of where I live. This has enabled me to develop my own unique quality of wood fired porcelain, proto-porcelains and blackware made from these special native stones. The Essential nature of this enterprise is about a respectful interaction with my environment, in this locality. When I was young I wanted to believe that there were some absolutes in life. I wanted to believe that there could be a definition of such concepts as truth and beauty. I’ve come to realise that there will not be any absolutes in my life other than old age, incontinence and death, possibly taxes. I have had to come to terms with the fact that good and evil, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness are all relative and coexist in each of us, all of the time. I accept this duality and embrace the angst that comes with the rejection of false certainties.
We have lost our bush land, we are loosing our native animals. The corner shop has gone. We are forced to drive in a car to a distant, edge of town, shopping mall to get to a bank and supermarket. Our neighbours houses have locked gates and shuttered windows. In short we are loosing our society. Everything has changed in my lifetime, and I don’t see it as better. I go to great lengths to avoid supporting the shopping mall. I search out the remaining family owned small businesses, the butcher, baker, fish monger and the greengrocer, to do my trade We have worked to become largely self-reliant with most of our food from our garden and orchards, but we still need to buy some protein.
We are no longer a nation of makers, we are all being corralled into becoming a nation of consumers. I reject this coercion. I will not buy vinyl coated chip-board and plastic, throw-away rubbish from Ikea or the hyper-mall. This apparent convenience is ruining the world. I want real things in my life, things that are beautiful as well as useful and that will last a lifetime if needed. I enjoy engaging with the patina of age and the mundane chips and tears of a life well lived on objects that I have come to love and respect.
Being brought up in a loosely Buddhist/Quaker household, I was probably the only 7 year old in my primary school who knew the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, or even who he was. Not that I thought that this was in any way important at the time, but looking back now it seems a bit weird? Given this starting point, it should be no surprise that my first pot in 1959 was an interpretation of a Tibetan butter lamp. It’s amazing what kids pick up from parents conversations. Not that I knew much about Tibetan butter lamps, but it is quite interesting to me on reflection, that this is what I chose to make, sitting in the gutter of the dirt road in front of where we lived and picking out fresh wet clay from the gutter after a rain storm. I suppose that it supports Loloya’s assertion that the man is made in the child before his seventh year. My mother kept that pot all her life and after her death, I discovered it amongst her personal treasures, tucked safely away, wrapped in cotton wool, in a box in her wardrobe. So it came back to me and I still have it. At that time, in this family setting, it was not the pot that was important, but the activity of its making and the effect that the pot and its creation would have on the maker and the people who used it, which was up for discussion and appreciation. Around this time it became clear to me that the best things in life were not things at all.
Rachel Carson was a hot topic in 1962. I was 10 and old enough to be expected to help shovel manure into the ‘turned’ compost heap for the large, extended-family vegetable plot that fed us all. In 1972 I had decided that I wanted to be a professional potter and was at Art School, starting to wonder where I would be living and how I could achieve a passive, independent existence as an artist. The Vietnam War was in full swing. I registered as a Conscientious Objector and the ‘The Club Of Rome’ released ‘Limits to Growth’. I decided that I could only hope to achieve financial, artistic and food security if I chose to live out in the country where land was cheaper and the air and water cleaner. These events and others like them ground my cultural lens and set its focal length. So now when I think about firing my kiln, I first think how important it is to fire as cleanly as possible, as I would be the first one to be concerned, if my neighbour were to create a lot of unnecessary smoke and pollution in his day to day life. I don’t see that being involved in a creative activity gives us some sort of carte blanche or ‘get out of jail free card’ to pollute.
I also think about how I can use as little wood as possible while still being able to see that my pot is obviously wood fired. I don’t buy my wood from a merchant. I grow it, cut it and split it myself. I have a finite amount of energy, everything that happens here is facilitated by human effort. However, I do use a few machines these days to help me do the heavy work as I get older. I have replaced my original old, hand cross-cut saw with a chain saw. The block buster with a hydraulic splitter. The water bucket with a pump. Hand and foot mixing my clay with a pug mill. I am not a luddite, but I am aware that everything has an environmental cost. However, as I age I need to reduce the physical strain on my body if I’m to continue to keep working and creating beautiful objects into the future.
I have an image of what I want to create. I chase it. It is beautiful, but elusive. I can never achieve what is in my minds eye, but I keep prosecuting the illusion that it is possible. I like the intimacy of the bowl form. It is small, round and engaging when cupped in the hands. I love them as objects, the symbolism of sharing, the embedded meaning of the food container, nourishment and sustenance. I love the rich history of the peasant rice bowl and the Japanese tea bowl. They are omnipresent at every level of my life. I eat and drink from my bowls every day
This image that I have of a beautiful bowl worthy of contemplation has a gentle wood fired and flashed surface. A surface that I have worked at developing over the past forty five years of my creative practice, where my selected local timbers, when burnt in my hand made kiln, leave their delicate ash patterns on the surface of my locally sourced, water-ground native porcelain stone clay bodies. This subtle wood fired ash glazing of the ceramic surfaces at high temperatures develops a wide range of colours, textures and patinas that are not usually seen on porcelain.
I think a lot about my firing process and the best way to get the soft, delicate and engaging surfaces that are tactile and suited to being hand held and smoothly functional as well as endeavoring to exploit Asian aesthetic concepts of irregularity. This porcelain is not from the moulds of Sèvres or Meissen. This work has a proud Southern Hemisphere heritage.
I also think about the effect that my firing will have on others, my neighbours and finally myself and my family. Will these small bowls that I am making have any genuine useful place in society? Will the viewer appreciate the philosophical meaning embedded in their making? I certainly hope so, but nothing is certain.
It has been said that the most rare and expensive commodity today is time. My methods are fully hands-on, antiquated, quaint and oh, so very slow, so my output is quite small. These objects are time solidified and made manifest. Beautiful, unique things like these take time to be brought to life, and more time to be given a useful life in daily use, so that they develop their mundane scars and patina of use. They grow and develop with time, just as they require time to be fully appreciated by use and enquiry.
The unexamined bowl, is a bowl not worth living with. You can buy those bowls at Ikea.
Steve Harrison Opening Statement – Towards a Greener Wood Firing Practice.
I have been wood firing for over 50 years now. Gosh, how time flys. I never thought that I’d live this long, never mind still be wood firing at this age. But Peter Rushforth was still wood firing right up until a few years before his death in his 90’s.
I became interested in firing my pots with wood while I was in art school at the old ESTC in 1971. There was no wood fired kiln at East Sydney back then. In fact there were no student built kilns there at all. However, I changed all that when I started teaching there in 1974. I built half a dozen wood fired kilns. In fact ESTC, got a reputation as the place to go if you wanted to learn about wood firing, at that time. This reputation was further enhanced when Bill Samuels joined the staff a few years later and built a tunnel kiln.
Returning to 1971, I realised while I was still a student that if I wanted to fire with wood, it would have to be in a self made kiln, built in my parents back yard. I had very tolerant and supportive parents! I was drawn to the quiet, natural qualities of wood firing. No one was wood firing back then in 1970, but I was influenced by my reading of books on Japanese tea wares. The pieces that I was drawn to were all wood fired, from Iga and Shigaraki, through Shino wares to Bizen pieces. All my teachers, Peter Rushforth, Col Levy and Derek Smith were firing with oil fired kilns. Bernie Sahm was firing with coke and later LP gas. Shiga Shigao, with whom I did my apprenticeship a few years later, was also firing with LP gas. So to fire with wood, for me, meant going it alone. Luckily, I had my partner Janine king who was also keen to fire with wood.
The only pottery book on the market at the time was Bernard Leach’s ‘A Potters Book’, everyone had a copy. It was required reading. In there Leach states that he built his first wood fired kiln in Japan as a student. It was a complete failure. He failed to get to temperature and also managed to burn down the kiln shed and studio in the process! He tells how wood firing is dirty, smoky, very difficult and exhausting. Possibly so, but Leach was an English Gentleman, not used to any hard physical work. He and Hamada, later built a 3 chamber climbing kiln, when he returned to England to set up the Leach Pottery in St Ives, but soon converted it to oil firing. Wood firing was just too demanding and difficult.
Leach states: “The reluctance of many kilns to rise above 1200oC to 1300oC has been to many another potter besides myself a cause for anxiety and even desperation. The firing is the climax of the potter’s labour, and in a wood fired kiln of any size it is a long and exhausting process. Weeks and months of work are at stake. Any one of a dozen things may go wrong. Wood may be damp, flues may get choked, bungs of saggars fall, shelves give way and alter draughts, packing may have been too greedily close, or for sheer exhaustion one may have snatched an hours sleep, handing over control to someone else and things begin to move, to warp and to bend, the roar of combustion takes on a deeper note—the heavy domes crack and tongues of white flame dart out here and there, the four minute stokes fill the kiln shed with bursts of dense black smoke and fire. Even in the east, where hand work is usual and labour specialised, a big kiln firing has the aspect of a battle field where men test themselves to the utmost against the odds. This may sound like discouragement, but it is the simple truth”.
Having read all this, it seems that all of the Australian potters followed suit.
The only wood fired kiln in Sydney when I was a student was at the University of NSW, in the Industrial Arts Dept. It was fired just a few times a year. Ivan McMeekin forbade any outside visitors to firings. Possibly on OH&S grounds. But especially students from the National Arts School, who he looked down on as being a bit radical and not properly trained. However, I used to turn up for the night shift after 5 pm when he had gone home, and made friends with some of the students. Ron Balderston and Geoff Crispin. I still see Ron, we became friends. I learnt a lot there. I sat quietly, was respectful and did a large share of the wood carting and stacking to earn my keep.
What I learnt at the uni of NSW, was that wood firing can be a quiet, easy, relaxed, efficient and a clean way to fire pots. It can be a beautiful experience! If you prepare yourself well, with all your wood cut, split and stacked next to the kiln, and if the kiln is built in a well planned, decent space with room around it and well ventilated. It is a remarkably satisfying experience. Whether this is how it is for you is entirely up to you to get your preparations in order. We have come a long way since Leach in the 1940’s.
I believe that it is widely understood by those who know me, that I am a Greenie! I am always looking for better, cleaner, more environmentally friendly ways to fire my kilns.
It is generally understood here how wood firing can be carbon neutral. The carbon in the wood fuel comes from the air and is returned to the air when burnt. If the tree is not burnt, but left to rot in the forest, all the carbon is still return to the environment, but on a longer time frame. However, cutting forest to burn as fuel can be an environmental disaster. Just think of Queenstown in Tasmania!
It all depends on how you go about obtaining you wood fuel, and how you choose to burn it. Janine and I are lucky enough to own our own forest, that we have nurtured and lightly harvested for its dead wood for almost 50 years. 48 to be precise.
But being carbon neutral is not what occupies my attention these days. There is the problem of particulate emissions from our chimneys, This is going to be a big issue into the future, not just smoke from chimneys, but the very fine PM2.5 particles. I understand that Canberra has now banned wood burning stoves within the city boundaries because of the health issues. Potters who claiming that “I only reduce at night”, or “I Live out in the country side” doesn’t remove the problem. It isn’t a responsible or thoughtful answer.
Over the last couple of years, I have been experimenting with an afterburner/spark arrestor/scrubber on top of my chimney. This is my attempt to reduce my particulates. It’s a work in progress at this stage, but I believe that I’m making some progress.
Stainless steel ‘Scrubber’ installed on top of the chimney.
We all have to do our bit to keep the environment as clean as possible while still living a creative life. I chose to fire my kilns very quickly to minimise the destructive environmental effects of my work. Janine’s little wood fired kiln fires in just 5 hours, my larger brick kiln is fired for about 15 hours. But I use a down draught fire box (Bourry Box). This makes for a relatively clean firing. It doesn’t put a lot of ash on the pots, but it ‘flashes’ the glaze surfaces, and enhances the look and feel of the pots. I really appreciate these minimal ash effects on my glazes. Just look at the work of Gwen Hanssen Pigott. Beautiful, elegant, lightly flashed wood fired surfaces.
I really love the delicate ash deposit that I get on the surface of my celadon glazes. it enhances them. It doesn’t detract in any way. Of course, right at the front of the setting where the ash and embers meet the first rows of pots. A lot can happen there. This is a place I call the ‘Zone of Death’, because a lot of pots are sometimes reduced to shards there, but ever so beautiful shards they are! These pieces can be just as interesting and dramatic as any pot from a 5 day firing, but without the emissions. See my piece titled ‘Damaged Goods’, as an example of this kind of fired surface.
Unglazed porcelain bowl with minor kintsugi repair.
Gathered here tonight are a representative sample of all of the different approaches to wood firing. It’s a very rich and varied field of artistic endeavour, and it’s so good to see so much great work all in one place. Long may we continue to stoke the fires of our creative desires.
Here we are in the first week of spring and the hot weather was very welcome, but unseasonably hot for this time of year. Just more evidence of global heating and what’s in store for us in the future?
I have given the peaches, nectarines and almonds a 2nd spray of copper Bordeaux mix to try and minimise leaf curl and shot hole fungus spores. It needs to be done once a month during the growing season. Actually, the recommendation is for every 10 days, but who has the time? And too much copper spray drift can build up in the soil and become toxic over long periods of time. So I just do the minimum.
I don’t think that I can ever eliminate it here, just keep it under control to minimise the damage. The trees don’t seem to suffer from it too much later in the season. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the cold damp nights in early spring?
Because of the warm weather. I planted out tomatoes, zucchinis and cucumber seedlings. Plus peas, beans, sweet basil, lettuce and radish seeds. Then last night we had a cracking frost. The Weather Bureau only forecast 2 degrees for Bowral, our nearest town with a weather station, and we are usually one or two degrees warmer than that. But not so last night. However, I checked the seedlings and they are all OK in the protective cocoon of the plastic bird netting frames that cover both the orchard and vegetable garden. Lucky!
The Flanders poppies have now started to open and will be with us for the next few months. They need disturbed soil to germinate, so do best in the vegetable garden, because the soil is regularly turned over while weeding and planting. I established them in the new orchard and they did well for the first year, but as I haven’t cultivated in there since, only mown, all their seeds are lying dormant in the soil, with no new plants germinating in there.
The Cherry trees are in full bloom now as is the avocado tree. Every thing is responding to the warmth. There is so much optimism in the air now. Life is returning to all the formally dormant plants. I took a picture of the lawn behind the house. I use the term ‘lawn’ very loosely. It is actually a stretch of self sown wild grasses and weeds that we keep mown. This stretch of mown weeds has just erupted on a blue haze of tiny flowers in huge swathes. The flowers are microscopic, but there are millions of them. I tired to photograph it, but the effect on the light out there just doesn’t show up a clearly in the image. Janine tells me that it is called ’Speedwell’, but our neighbour, John Meredith used to call it ’The blue pimpernel’. What ever it is, it’s very pretty on mass.
We have just completed the last of 5 in a row, weekend workshops. Quite a busy time for us. It’s nice to have a bit of ’spare’ time now, so I’m back in the garden, just in time for spring. The asparagus is just starting to pop up, just a few at a time, here and there. The real season is still a couple of weeks off as yet, but I’m picking the biggest ones to have with our breakfast eggs.
Now that I have just a smidgen of spare time, I have mended the old wheel barrow. We bought this wheel barrow in 1976 or ’77? More or less the first year that we arrived here. We had worn out two 2nd hand ones previously. Purchasing this one was a real statement of ‘We have arrived, and we intend to cultivate this derelict place’. The bottom got rather scratched over the years and had started to rust out, becoming wafer thin and flimsy. I hate to see waste, so I stepped in and made a new base plate for the tray and fitted new bearings into the wheel hub. It’s all good for another couple of years till the next part wears out.
At the start of this month we had the first buds and then flowers open on the earliest peach tree. Luckily I thought to spray all the fruit trees with lime sulphur last month, as that has to be done before bud burst. I really need to get in there and finish the winter pruning. I have done all the peaches and cherry trees in the veggie garden netted area.
June for spraying lime sulphur, July for pruning, August to start spraying copper (Bordeaux) for leaf curl fungus. Winter is a busy time when nothing is happening!
There is a lot of work in being low impact, organic, nature friendly and carbon neutral. I haven’t had any spare time to do any composting around the fruit trees so far. So I will give them a hand full of chicken manure and some dolomite and wood ashes this time round. All of the chicken run scratch litter and manure mix has been going around the almonds trees so far this year. With only 4 chooks, there isn’t a lot to go round and with over 60 fruit and nut trees to manage, I buy a few bags of dynamic lifter composted chicken manure pellets, so as to give every tree a bit of a boost. They all get a good dose of wood ash in sequence throughout the winter, as we clean out the ashes from the various wood stoves and burn piles.
The wheel barrow has a garbage tin full of wood ash, a bag of composted chook pooh pellets and a bag of dolomite. I work my way about the orchard spreading the goodness around the drip line.
Janine harvested our Purple Congo potatoes, I caught her down gleaning the last of them from the southern end of the garden, just before I got stuck in and weeded and tilled it over, then covered it in compost to put it to bed to fallow until spring.
When we were in Germany a decade ago, we stayed with an extended family of potters who had gleaning rights with a local farmer, a concession that had been going on for generations I believe.
We spent a day helping them glean a paddock that had been harvested of its potatoes, but there were lots of undersized or slightly damaged ones that were there for the picking.
I remember seeing a Van Gogh painting of ‘The Potato Gleaners’, and there we were in Germany engaging in this very ancient practice. I really enjoyed it, fore-stalling waste. I wrote about it at the time on my blog. Gleaning is a very ancient right. It was established in France in the 1500’s and protected by the constitution. Today, I suppose that the equivalent would be dumpster diving? No need for either of us here to dumpster dive, because we have developed this positive, creative, environmentally friendly lifestyle. We grow all of our own green food, vegetables and fruit.
It’s a lot of work, but very rewarding when I get to look at what I’ve achieved after a day of work in the garden. The effort gives me a lot of pleasure, even though I have all the aches and strains from the work, but then I think of all the loads of vegetables flowing to us over the year, and there is always a bit of excess to share with our neighbours. Planting seeds is such a positive, hopeful and uplifting act of rebellion.
Broad beans, garlic and brassicas are all growing well, and planted in series to ensure a continuous supply of some sort of food throughout the seasons.
Now in mid winter, there are plenty of cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli and brussel sprouts. One delicious option for us is to make okonomiyaki. The Japanese traditional cabbage pancake. We are not au fait with all things Japanese, but I have a keen interest in the culture and I have visited many times to study ceramics there. Okonomiyaki is a quick and easy meal that uses cabbage in a different and interesting way.
I’m told that okonomiyaki is literally translated as ‘you choose what you want’. Yaki means cooked or burnt as in pottery being yaki, or fired, and there is the character for ‘no’, which means ‘of’ stuck in the middle, so maybe ‘oko’ and ‘mi’ are to do with you and choose?
I take it to mean that I’m cooking a cabbage pancake and you can choose to add whatever you want to go in the mix. But it’s always cabbage, egg and pork!
The Koreans have a similar traditional cabbage pancake made with kinchi pickled cabbage, ‘panjun’ (sp) not too sure about the true pronunciation or the spelling there, but it tastes delicious no matter how you spell it..
Although there are minor differences throughout Japan from north to south, okonomiyaki remains pretty much the same everywhere. I’ve had it in Mashiko to the north of Tokyo and also in Arita in Kyushu in the far south. I first tasted it in Imbe in 1986, more or less smack in between. Always delicious and very recognisable.
Apparently within Japan there is hot debate between various cities such as Osaka and Kyoto, as to who makes the better and most ‘authentic’ okonomiyaki. As an outsider, I have no opinion on the matter. I love them all.
My Japanese friend has suggested to me that it should be made with grated Japanese mountain potato starch, to get the best texture, but as that isn’t readily available here, that I have been able to find. She told me that I can mix in a small % of tapioca starch to give the mix a creamy texture.
I tried Japanese kuzu powder and corn flour, but that made the pancake too sticky and glutinous. My okonomiyaki is an Australian multi-cultural work in progress. The home grown organic cabbage is really the high light, freshly picked and snappy crisp, it’s great. I’ve tried different varieties of cabbage, the best ones are the light and slightly curly types like savoy. Dense cabbages like red cabbage need to be par-boiled to soften them beforehand otherwise they are still a bit tough and chewy after the quick light cooking of the pancake.
The traditional recipe calls for a thin slice of pork and then an egg cracked over the top towards the end of cooking. I have plenty of fresh eggs, but not always fresh, thinly sliced pork. However, I can usually find some Italian style, dried, salted and lightly smoked, thin slices of pork in the deli shop. That makes a suitable substitute. No self-respecting Japanese person would recognise the mess that I end up serving, but it tastes OK, it’s fresh and it’s healthy. Ne!
It’s been an honour, joy and privilege to have had the pleasure of managing and curating these 7 acres, along with Janine for the past 48 years. I am so lucky to live and work in such a great place.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
You must be logged in to post a comment.