Last week I was busy making clay for the fast approaching, up-coming weekend workshops. I made half a tonne of special clay body with a bit of extra grit, adding some more ‘tooth’ to the usual reliable body that I make up for us.
It took me two days. I can make up a quarter of a tonne of clay each day from scratch, pug it twice to ensure even mixing, then re-pugged through the Venco Vacuum pug mill and finally bagged and stacked. Along with sorting materials, weighing out, mixing, pugging and finally cleaning up, I have to have a day off in-between to catch up and to avoid over-doing it. Suddenly a week has gone by, but now it’s all done and ready for the next couple of workshops. We are pretty self reliant in the pottery here. Using our own electricity, our own rain water, using all the machinery and equipment that I have either made, re-purposed or re-built after the fire. I’m fairly proud of this minor achievement of self-sufficiency.
This week we have been very busy with all sorts of little jobs. We ate the last of our late season tomatoes. Surely this must be the last of the late crop. I’m not expecting the last 3 green toms to ripen very well, so these half dozen little self sown gems will probably be it. And very nice too. We cant expect to see another ripe tomato here until just before Xmas if all goes well with the spring planting for next summer’s crop. This must be some sort of record for us, eating home grown red ripe tomatoes for the garden in the last week of July.
What we are getting a lot of from the garden are cauliflowers, broccoli and Brussels sprouts, all the usual winter fare. last night I harvested the first pick of parsnips for our baked veggie dinner. Cauliflowers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, potato, pumpkin and onion, baked in the oven and then dressed in a cheesy béchamel source. A lovely, warming, winters dinner.
This weeks loaf of rye bread was the usual beauty. All crusty and solid dense rye inside. I use 50% of wheat flour as well so as the get it to rise, as there is very little gluten in rye flour, but it has fantastic flavour. I’m using locally grown and milled organic stone ground flours from the wheat belt of NSW. All grown, harvested and milled on site on the family farm.
This week we also hosted a weekend workshop, but held mid-week, Tuesday to Thursday for a student from FNQ. I had offered a glaze workshop last year, but only got 3 replies, and only one who paid. so it was cancelled. Not enough to make it worthwhile to run it. One potter enquired as to when the next one would be offered. I told her that it wouldn’t. Then she asked how much it would cost for me to do a private one-on-one workshop. She applied for a grant, was successful and so she was here this week. A year later than originally offered.
I spent Tuesday morning waiting for her to arrive from Queensland sieving wood ashes from the various fires, stoves, burn piles and kiln fireboxes, ready for use in our testing. I still had a little time, before she arrived, so decided to make a wooden pottery tool. At the last throwing workshop, my good friend Len Smith left behind a wooden comb that turned up in the throwing water. I really liked it and had got used to using it. It’s very comfortable in the hand and very useful. I really like it and was sad to have to give it back when Len next visited for the recent wood firing a week or so back. I decided to make one for myself, so I set to it and in half an hour I had one made. Not as good as Len’s, but I think that it is workable. and most importantly, it’s home made onsite from scrap wood. Not as good as the bought one perhaps, but individual, personal and much more meaningful. It still needs a little bit more sanding and finishing, then some vegetable oil, and it’s ready to go.
When my student arrived from the airport, we had lunch and spent the afternoon doing a geology tour of the Southern Highlands, collecting samples and talking geology, analysis and geological maps on the short drives in-between sites. Day two was spent crushing and milling our samples in the morning and then making glaze tests in the afternoon. We finished the weighing out in the late afternoon, having completed 13 test tiles, half for oxidation and half destined for reduction firing. We packed both the electric kiln and small gas kiln with our test tiles before dinner. The solar electric kiln was fired over night used the days stored sunlight energy from our battery, while we fired the small portable gas kiln during the evening into the night, a 3 hour reduction firing from 6 till 9.00PM.
Day three morning was spent unpacking the kilns, debriefing on the results, and then a theory class on glaze technology, choice of materials, Segar Formula and loads of other relevant related glaze topics. We finished on que at lunch time, in time for her return to the airport for her flight home. A fully packed, midweek-weekend, intensive crash course in geology, rock glazes and using collected ‘wild’ local materials. Ashes, gravels, arkose, clays and rocks, all alchemically metamorphosed from road side dirt into shiny glazes.
The only noise that I can hear is the sound of the ice under my feet crunching as I walk down to the pottery. It is 5.00 am and pitch black this wintery morning. No stars, so there must be a lot of cloud? It’s too early even for the birds to be stirring and beginning to make their first tentative calls.
I love these early starts. The air is very cold and crisp. My noise hurts in the minus degrees air. fortunately there is no wind, so I’m lucky. It could be colder.
I’m fumbling trying to light a match wearing gloves, but I do it, and the little kindling fire slowly spreads and comes to life. There is a strong draught in the firebox because I had the kiln lit and firing yesterday evening through into the night, preheating all the raw glazed pots, I have to be careful not to heat the kiln too fast, as the raw pots may still have a small amount of water in them that can easily turn to steam, expand and blow the pot up. This would be a disaster, not because I might loose a single pot, but because the explosion would spread shrapnel like fragments and even larger chunks of rubble through out the kiln chamber and bits would land in almost every open bowl-like form. I’d need to stop and unpack the whole kiln and start again.
By staying up last night keeping a small kindling fire going, I had the kiln up to just above 100 degrees centigrade, sufficient to dry all the pots out thoroughly. I preheat into the dark, leave it to sit and sweat while I have dinner and then I’m back down here to keep the fire alive for a few more hours. This gentle start to the firing is very important and can’t be rushed. I’m used to sitting in the dark, all my wood kiln firings start and end in the dark.
The firing goes well, everything is prepared in advance, all the different sizes of wood, from kindling through floor wood onto hob logs, it’s all cut and stacked next to the kiln. I have my tea making gear ready. Thick, warm, long, leather gauntlet gloves, initially to keep my hands warm, but later to stop them getting too warm or even burnt while stoking. A few hours later, Janine and Len arrive, I’m just about ready to go to hobs with the stoking and shortly afterwards to start reduction. Janine cooks breakfast for us, we have bacon and eggs, then toast and marmalade with coffee. A great start to a good firing. I love my home made marmalade!
I stoke the fire box, keeping it full to the top, and this generates a consistent level of reduction. I initially use some thinner sticks of 75mm up to 100 mm. diameter, stoking every 15 mins, but as the kiln get hotter, I soon move on to the heavier thicker logs of 100 to 150 mm diameter, and eventually up to 200mm diameter. these burn consistently over a longer period, so I only have to stoke every 30 to 45 mins. The biggest and thickest logs can burn for up to 1 hour, keeping a steady reduction atmosphere and a gentle temperature rise. This is kept steady and even for the following 10 hours, while maintaining a pretty clean chimney. Something that I’m proud of. Minimising any smoke and using my afterburner and scrubber on top of the chimney to minimise any PM 2.5 particulates escaping to the environment.
I have spent the past few years experimenting in new ways to pack and fire this kiln. There are so many variables, but a steady reduction atmosphere is a necessary constant for good clay and glaze colour. I fire for about 14 or so hours. I finish up around 8 pm, but need to hang around for another hour for the burning down process, before closing the damper in the chimney. I will leave the scrubber running for another hour while I go up to the house for a glass of wine to celebrate and a bit of chat. Later, I return to the pottery to check on everything, switch off the scrubber pump and all the lights and lock up. I have to leave the scrubber water pump running for an extra hour or so, to make sure that it doesn’t over heat from the hot air coming up the chimney during cooling. I don’t want to melt the delicate brass spray nozzle.
A while ago, I made enquiries about getting a stainless steel version of the same fitting, but the guy wanted $250 for it. Extortion! It’s better to replace the brass one every few years at just $10.
Wood firing is such an old fashioned occupation. I love it, not because of its long history, or its hands on haptic rewards, or because it is a way of avoiding the use of fossil fuels, nor its DIY economical kiln structure investment of 2nd hand fire bricks, making it economical, but in essence, it’s simply because of the quality of the pots that I can make by doing it. It is all of the above of course, all rolled into one experience, but it’s the beautiful ash enhanced surface on the pots that keeps me doing all the extra work involved in their creation.
However, having said that, I’m also really engaged with minimising my carbon foot print, so burning wood that I have grown myself, from my own forest is an achievement. I’m so privileged, not many people can claim that. Wood is a form of stored carbon extracted from the air, which when burnt, returns to the air. A beautiful, virtuous circle. It almost entirely eliminates fossil fuels. However, although I use a solar-electric chain saw to cut up the smaller logs and I split the timber using a solar-electric splitter that I re-built myself from a burnt out petrol model, (re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose.) which runs off our solar PV electricity. I still have a big petrol powered chain saw and I cart the logs on my old 21 year old petrol powered ute, but this is extremely minimal fossil fuel use for a kiln firing. Maybe one day there will be an electric ute? Nothing is perfect, so I’m happy with where I am at the moment. I have attempted to do all this so far on a low budget working in the arts.
Winter is the season for wood firing and also for spending the long evenings cooking in the kitchen. We light the wood fired kitchen stove each evening in the winter, which heats the room, but also heats our hot water from the ‘wet-back’ boiler in behind the firebox, while I am cooking our dinner. Winter is also citrus season. So marmalade making is on the agenda.
Making marmalade is such an old fashioned thing to do. It’s sort of a grandma’s thing really, young people don’t seem to know much about it. but I love the stuff, so I have taught myself to make it reasonably well. Every batch is slightly different as I experiment, trying to learn whatever there is to be learnt. My methods are also different from Janine’s, so we have various jars of different marmalades. I like testing out all the various marmalade making techniques. It’s a real learning curve. Exactly the same as when I’m wood firing. Everything is a bit of an experiment.
I can’t really bring myself to want to do exactly the same thing every time. I love to experiment, trying different ways of packing the kiln, different shelf layouts, experiment with different clay bodies, decorating techniques, choice of timbers and wadding. Everything makes a difference. Before the 2019 fires, the last kiln that I had, was there for 15 years, altered a coupe of times, but in continuous use. I got to know it well, I was able to get some really nice pots out of it. This new kiln is a learning experience. I haven’t had a kiln exactly like this before, so I’m only just getting to know it now after 5 or 6 years.
Packing and firing is a little bit stressful. There is a months work at stake, as the wood kiln is so much bigger than the electric kilns, and all the little changes that I decide to make will have unknown consequences. Hopefully they will lead to something better, but not always. I just have to decide to take the plunge. Wood firing to me is akin to pruning the orchard. That might sound strange, but it has similarities. I’ve been doing both for 50 years and still don’t know exactly what I’m doing with either. There are so many variables that I don’t understand fully, but there is no point in procrastinating. I just make the decision and go for it.
With pruning, each tree is different. I’ve done it before, but was it right?. I have to get over 60 trees pruned. I don’t have unlimited time, so I have to make decisions, and fast. I decide and then do it. I open the centre to let light in, take off any dead wood, remove all the water shoots and crossed branches, reduce top growth by 2/3 to keep the tree manageable and prune to an outward facing bud. That’s it! It’s simple! But which bud, and at what height, how much to take from the centre, which of the two crossed branches to remove and which to keep? I’m never sure. But I choose and do it.
The same with packing the kiln. I can think about it for a long time, but still not know if it is the best option or not. So I’ve learnt to just do it and accept the consequences. Occasionally I unpack a bit and re-do it, but not often. I do take photographs as I pack though, so that I will be able to remember what it was that I did, 3 days later, after I unpack and study the results. If it doesn’t turn out how I imagined or hoped, no worries, it was a learning experience. Hopefully there are enough good ones to make it feel like it was all worth it.
Sometimes the pots turn out not at all like I was expecting, so I’m not too thrilled. However, it is a case of not seeing what I was expecting to see. After cleaning, fettling and grinding their bases, I get a better look at them and start to see their good points. They are often quite good, just not what I was anticipating. I end up well pleased with the fresh surface quality and I learn something new. So it’s all good.
July means that it’s time to get to work in the orchards. There is pruning to do. I usually wait until most of the trees loose their leaves before pruning as a rule, but with such a range of trees in this family orchard of mixed fruits, there are some that have lost their leaves a month ago and others that are still in leaf.
In a perfect world, I’d treat each tree as an individual and consider its best needs, one by one.
But this is reality, and I have a lot to do everyday through the seasons. Winter is also wood kiln firing season. I want to fire my wood kiln at least once each month to get through all the pots that I’ve been making since my return from the work that I did in Korea. So the orchard pruning/spraying/fertilising is all compressed into one day, as needs must. I have my friend Andy coming tomorrow to help me do some of the last outstanding jobs to finish off the pottery shed. It needs flashing installed over the windows. Something the shed builders didn’t bother to do. Slack arses! So I’m finally getting around to it 5 years later.
I choose a day at the beginning of July and get stuck in to the orchard jobs. Every tree gets pruned for shape and strength, removing any dead wood, crossed branches and water-shoots, I also open up the centre to let light and air in and allow good ventilation. I prune to an outward pointing bud, and hope for the best. I’m not so interested in maximising the crop of fruit. In fact we have more than enough fruit set each season, as we give a lot away.
Yesterday during pruning, I noticed that I was pruning off branches from an apple tree with full vigorous growth of leaves still on, and then followed by a peach that was so advanced in its dormancy, that it had bud swell. I really need to give the trees a good saturating spray with lime sulphur before bud burst to suppress mildew, fungus and leaf-curl on the various trees. Lime sulphur spray stinks of rotten egg gas smell, and is best kept off your skin and clothes, so I wear a face shield, hat, rain coat and gloves, just in case.
One of the apples gets white powdery mildew, a couple of the peaches get leaf curl. It’s a mixed bag. After lime sulphur spray, I go around and spread composted chicken manure for its nitrogen, dolomite powder for its mixed, subtle calcium/magnesium content, and some wood ashes for the potassium that encourages healthy fruiting.
The chickens have the stone-fruit orchard all to them selves everyday to roam and scratch around in. Always finding something interesting to chase and squabble over. They are forever dropping their pooh and enriching the soil as they go about scratching, so a little extra lime every now and then to sweeten the soil is a good plan.
In a few weeks time, I’ll also start the first of the Bordeaux sprays, to suppress the leaf curl fungus, through into spring. Peaches and nectarines are particularly vulnerable to this fungus. Bordeaux spray (copper sulphate mixed with lime) helps to control this. Both Bordeaux and Lime sulphur are registered organic sprays.So I can feel safe using them on our food. However, I like to use the minimum amount, as copper can build up in the soil over time.
Out of the garden and into the kitchen. Winter is also peak season for citrus fruits. We have been making batches of marmalade since the season started back at the beginning of June. This week I have been trying out an old recipe that I got out of Mrs Beaton’s cook book. I have the paperback facsimile edition from the mid seventies. I was encouraged to try it out by my friend Bill who makes lovely marmalade. I occasionally post him a box of Seville oranges and he later returns a jar of his latest batch of marmalade. A good arrangement.
This year I’m giving one of Mrs Beaton’s recipes a try. There are a few in the book. This is No.2 as recommended by Bill. I doubled the quantities, to make it worthwhile spending the time on it. However. I couldn’t bring myself to use 3 lbs (2.7kgs) of sugar. So I reduced it to 1 kg and added 25 grams of pectin to make up for the reduced sugar. After converting it to metic and doubling all the quantities, it still tastes great!
It’s a good recipe and in this slightly altered form, with much less sugar. I still find it very sweet. I’m glad that I didn’t bother trying it in the original. I wouldn’t have enjoyed eating it at all. Boiling the whole fruit for 2 hrs and letting it sit overnight to cool gives it a very old fashioned sour flavour from the peel that we don’t get by just boiling the peel and juice for a short time.
This recipe gave me 3.5 litres of marmalade = 6 medium sized jars. Worth the effort. We had visitors while I was cooking it up. They all walked into the kitchen and each remarked on how wonderful the smell was as they entered. We were able to give them a large box of mixed citrus to take with them.
Out of the kitchen and onto more pressing practical matters, I made my own new flashing for the pottery shed windows from two sheets of 2440 x 1220 x 0.9mm sheets of galvanised steel, that I cut and folded on the guillotine and pan break, custom fitted for my windows. The lengths of flashing have to be marked and then cut out to perfectly fit into the curves of the corrugated iron sheeting on the walls. In a perfect world. The shed builders should have fitted flashing above the windows before they installed the outer wall sheeting. But they didn’t bother to do anything at all, so the window seals around the edges leaked. But not any more.
Andy and I marked out, hand cut and fitted the curves exactly to match the variations in the mixed 2nd hand gal sheets. A slow, but rewarding job. We couldn’t use a template, as almost every sheet is different across the wall. Until I collected all this mixed corrugated iron roofing fro mall around Sydney and the Highlands. I didn’t realise how many different profiles of corrugated iron there were. I just thought that it was all the same. But every company has their own individual variation of the profile.
We spend a day going around the building and fitting the new flashing above all the openings. We can’t take off all the cladding to do it properly. As it should have been done. So we add the flashing onto the wall sheeting and cut it into the profile and seal it with silicon. It’s quicker, but still takes us all day to do 5 double windows and 3 garage sized roller doors.
Bit by bit I’m getting the shed finished. It’s only taken 6 years to get this job finally complete.
All the flashings acting as mini-awnings above every opening.
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.
The winter is well and truely here now. We have passed the solstice. We are getting cracking frosts that turn the paddocks silver/white. Janine harvested the last of the almost red, struggling, self sown, tomatoes just in time before the first of the really heavy frosts reduced the plants to crisp brown stalks. The shrivelled plants and their remaining unripened green tomatoes will be composted – eventually, when the weather warms up a little. The mid-winter garden looks a little bit forlorn, but it is still feeding us really well.
We are continuing to pick the citrus fruits. The later crop of Seville oranges are just starting now, so some serious marmalade making will be taking place in the evenings from now on.
I’ve done the first wood kiln firing since returning from my work in Korea. It worked perfectly, and the results were good, although I’m always hoping for something a little bit better, however, I’m happy with the best pots and there is always a string of new test bodies and glazes developing from my local rocks. The samples are encouraging.
I start the firing in the very early morning, so early that there is no noise at all. At 3.30am it is pitch black and really quiet. No traffic noises from the main road. Every body is in bed. It’s a great time to start that tiny little kindling fire, nurture it and watch it slowly grow and develop into something with a life of its own. The little kindling fire is quite an intense time, you can’t walk away for any reason. You have to turn up prepared to sit and pay attention. I don’t leave to make some breakfast and a cup of tea until I start to stoke the bigger blocks of hard wood. Then there is some time to boil the kettle and make some toast.
By morning, I’ve progressed to the hobs and my firing friends have turned up, so Janine makes us all a proper hot breakfast, cooked on the pottery wood stove. A special treat of our own chickens eggs and some nitrate-free bacon, followed by coffee, our own marmalade on my home made rye bread toast.
I have put a second water spray in my chimney top scrubber and the coarser droplets can be seen wafting out from the top of the scrubber, illuminated in the morning light. They fall like light rain bringing down PM2.5 carbon particles with them. The rest are collected inside the scrubber gutter and drained down into the soil in the back garden.
After unpacking the kiln, the first thing is the house-keeping, cleaning out the firebox and chamber floor, washing the bricks and kiln shelves with alumina, then finally fettling the work. I can see that the sgraffito work is quite different in the wood kiln. The ash and higher temperatures completely change the look of the work compared to the similar pieces fired with solar electricity in the electric kiln.
As heavy rain is forecast for the next week, I wanted to get a load of kiln fuel, in and under cover, ready for the next firing. I spent a few days winching over and cutting down some of our standing dead trees in the far paddock. They were killed in the 2019 catastrophic bush fires that cleaned us out. There is a lot of re-growth now and the understory is coming back up. I’m not sure about these long-dead, burnt trees. Just how stable they are, or if they are partially rotten inside. Dead wood like this can be unpredictable – therefore dangerous. So I’m taking no chances. I wrap a load-chain around the trunk up as far as I can reach, or if they are very tall, I use a ladder to get the connection point up as high as I can. Felling trees is dangerous, so to make it safer, I climb ladders – which is equally dangerous after you turn 50? or 60? or 70? Climbing ladders to make it safer seems a bit of a contradiction, but who said life was straightforward and easy.
Once the chain is (un)safely connected. I remove the ladder and pay out the chain over to where I have a steel wire winch connected to a substantial tree trunk. I cut out a wedge from the chosen tree in the direction that I expect it to fall, then go to the winch and apply a bit of tension, quite a bit, until I see the tree bend over slightly in the desired direction. Lastly, I put a cut in the back of the trunk, stand aside and watch as it falls over to where it is being pulled by the directional cutting and the pull of the winch.
I has worked perfectly every time so far, except once. When the tree was so rotten inside that the weight of a large side branch took it across in an unexpected direction to one side. As I’m standing well back and a little to one side as it goes. I feel that I’m relatively safe. I have been so far, even when the tree goes off sideways in it’s own way.
With smaller saplings, I just attach the wire rope/load chain to the tractor and pull them over.
The wood is all cut, split and stacked ready for the next firing. My hardwood seems to be getting harder as I get softer? It’s a big effort these days to restock the kiln hob wood pile.
After it’s all done. I’m blessed with a perfect red sunset. Some shepherd somewhere will be delighted.
I’m back home from my work in Korea. I managed to drop a firebrick on my foot on the 3rd day. I couldn’t wear a shoe after that, as the big toe had swollen up so much, such that I had to wear a plastic ‘flip-flop’ thong to keep working. I went to the local convenience store in the village and bought alcohol disinfectant spray for cleaning the toe, over-sized bandaids, gauze bandage and medical tape. I was amazed that such a tiny village shop had everything that I needed. The next day, the local government health clinic was open and my friends took me to the clinic to see the doctor. I needed them to translate for me. The doctor told me that I had kept it very clean and to try and keep it elevated, not to walk on it too much and that if it started to throb or get red. I should come back ASAP. As a precaution, he prescribed and also issued me with 2 different antibiotics, for 3 times a day, enough for 10 days. I don’t like to take any antibiotics if I don’t absolutely need to, but I certainly didn’t want to end up with medical complications while in a foreign country, so I took them. I didn’t want to risk getting toe-main poisoning and it spreading up my leg to Knee-monia and possibly even dick-theria.The doctor offered me an X-ray, but I assured him that I could still bend the toe. I had to demonstrate that for him, so that he was satisfied.
My friend got out his credit card to pay, but there was no charge!!!! I’m a foreigner here. I don’t pay taxes here. I should pay for such a terrific service. Korea is an amazing place!
My foot was still swollen, and I was still wearing a plastic flip-flop thong on my foot right up until I left Korea. I even had to attend the official opening of the exhibition in my formal black thong. The nail has since died and come off. I’m so lucky that I have such good friends and that it wasn’t worse. The garden has grown such a lot while I was away, and badly needs a lot of weeding. Apparently there was a lot of rain and the temperature was quite mild. So plenty of late autumn growth. I got stuck into the weeding straight away, just an hour at a time each day. Weeding always involves such a lot of bending. I’m of an age where this is not so comfortable any more. So I space out my efforts, I didn’t want to over do it. The second day, I decided to wear knee pads so that I could get closer to the weeds, to minimise the bending. I also wore light gloves to save my fingers. So I am learning to change my old habits to make living here the way that I have so far, and want to continue to do into the future, a more achievable prospect. This is a really hands-on life style, doing almost everything the old fashioned way, by hand, honouring local gardening lore and organic traditions with green environmental knowhow/theories. A permanent garden/orchard/vegetable patch, including chickens, all inter-woven and based on sustainable living principals, but with a nod to modern conveniences where necessary, like a cultivator and a mower. We can still pick all of our salad lunches and our nightly dinner from the garden each evening, it’s just that the flavours have changed to winter forage now. We have all the usual winter greens, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and kohlrabi. We cook a lot of vegetable stir fry, tofu, okonomiyaki, Japanese style cabbage pan cake, baked mixed vegetables, and cauliflower au gratin etc. We have also just celebrated the start of the cold winter season with an old fashioned baked dinner. Our first red meat meal since last winter.
Other than weeding the garden, there is also a lot of mowing, so an hour or so of that each day too. The garden work fills half the day. I’m using the electric ride-on mower for the bigger areas that have become deep in luscious growth. But I also use the electric strimmer for all the edges where the ride on can’t get to. It’s a good feeling to know that all the work is being achieved powered by sunshine these days instead of fossil fuels. Janine fills in the gaps with the electric push mower, to get in under the branches of the fruit trees and other similarly appropriate places for that mower.
We have worked hard at planning and finally becoming a fully solar electric household. We started back in 2007, when the cost of solar panels finally became affordable for us. When I was a teenager, the only solar panels were to be found on space craft and satellites. We’ve come a long way and Australia can be proud of the world famous, ground breaking research into refining solar panel technology done by Professor Green at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. We have slowly increased our solar PV over the years, until now we have 17kW of PV panels and two 15 kWh batteries. Sufficient to charge 2 electric cars, run the house and pottery workshop, Fire our electric kilns and if carefully managed, also selling the excess back to the grid. Although we try to minimise our exports, as we only get paid 5 cents per kWh. It’s better to use it all ourselves. We haven’t paid a power bill since 2007, and spend more money on petrol for things like the chain saw and fire fighting pumps than we do on our Plug-In Hybrid car. Now that the garden and grounds are back under control, I’m also back in the pottery, making pots again, for the other half of each day, making again is fun and half of my existence. My start back on the potters wheel was delayed by a day, as the pug mill had seized up from being left for too long without use. I had to hand scrape the clay from the barrel nozzle and take out the vacuum screens to remove hardened clay from the mesh. Quicker and easier than a complete strip down, but still time consuming. It somehow feels like a bit of a waste of time, but any other option is far worse, I’m so grateful to my friends who passed on their old pug mills to me after the fire. You know who you are. Thank You! I’m very grateful to be so lucky to own my very old, re-furbished, Venco pug mills.
The next day I’m back on the wheel throwing perfectly de-aired and beautifully mixed plastic clay. My old wrists are too worn out to hand wedge all my clay any more. I did manage a lot of hand wedging for the first year back at work here, during lock down. I couldn’t buy a new Venco as they were out of production, and the large 100mm. model is still un-available! I don’t know where I get the energy and enthusiasm to keep on working like this into my older years, other friends and colleagues have retired, but I was determined not to let the 3rd bush fire in 50 years and loss of another pottery workshop stop me. I’m still here and still creating the things that I love. So out of desperation and necessity, I hand wedged my clay to my lasting detriment. My ageing wrists have never really recovered. Even throwing slowly on the kick wheel, causes just a little bit of a twinge, so I have to modify my hand position slightly to cope. We have a few Shimpo electric potters wheels, mostly used for our weekend workshops, that run on our solar power, but I really prefer the old ‘Leach’ treadle style kick wheel for all the smaller domestic pots.
Winter brings on the citrus crop, so we start the season by making 2 batches of marmalade, lemon, lemonade and lime marmalade and then tangelo and navel orange marmalade. The Seville oranges aren’t ready yet. They come on later in the season. They make the very best marmalade.
It’s hard to believe, but today, in winter, at the end of the first week of June, I picked a ripe red tomato. We still have self sown tomato plants flowering. We have had ripe tomatoes in June before. It all depends on the severity of the frosts. At this stage we have had a frost during the week, but because the vegetable garden is fully netted to keep out the birds, that netting seems to just take the edge off the frosts, allowing us to still harvest tomatoes so late in the season.
It’s so good to be home again! We have a quotidian flock of wild wood ducks, that have decided to take up residence on the front lawn, sometimes up to 30 or so of them. They seem to like it here. Plenty of grass to eat and 4 dams to explore. Why wouldn’t they? They were probably all born and raised here over the years. They do pooh all over the lawn, so we have to watch where we step and wipe our feet at lot. We have a shoes-off household, so no problem about the house, but a lot of pooh gets tramped into the pottery workshop when we have weekend workshops and open days.
If this is my biggest problem in life. I’m so, so lucky!
Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished, and nothing lasts.
My project to introduce clean, low emissions, wood fired kiln technology to Korea has gone pretty well. The third firing that I did using local hard wood was excellent. In fact, better than I had hoped for. I was actually surprised how well it went. I’m a cautious person, So I was a bit surprised, I wasn’t going to dare to change anything, just stick to my technique and decisions. It worked! So that was good!
I’m always prepared for things to go wrong when trying new things. Very few things in life ever turn out perfectly, and this last firing came close, but the was no cigar! The bottom back shelf was still a little bit under-fired. However, no-one complained!
The day after the kiln was unpacked, I went down to the kiln shed early the next morning, before work, and took out the bag wall. I eliminated one complete layer off the top, and removed one full brick from the cross-section. I re-arranged the smaller number of fire bricks with bigger gaps between them, so as to allow more flame to pass straight across the bottom of the chamber and allow more heat to the bottom back shelf.
Over the three firings that I did here, I got better results each time, as I tuned the kiln settings and chose better wood, more appropriate to fire cleanly in this design of kiln.
Below is an image of my kiln firing to stoneware in reduction near top temperature. There is no smoke coming from the top of the chimney.
My chimney isn’t particularly tall, but it is wide. Short and thick, does the trick! Or so I’m told!
I calculated the height and cross-section of the chimney based on theory. The total volume of the hot gasses enclosed in the chimney volume, as opposed to the same volume of cold air on the outside. Chimneys work because the cold air outside is forced in at the firebox by air pressure, and this pushes the lighter hot air up and out of the top of the chimney. It’s all about volume, not just height.
Below is the traditional kiln next to mine being fired the traditional way. Koreans are used to making loads of smoke. It just seems so natural to them. They were quietly amazed that I could fire with so little smoke and still reduce. One of the traditional kiln firing team, A National Treasure potter from his own local region, went straight home and built a copy of my kiln for himself. So I consider that a success!
So my introduction of new ideas, with appropriately successful results, was well received. My host, Mr Jung, had organised the local TV station to make a documentary film about my visit, the firings and the subsequent exhibition of the fired works. Several international potters from France, Japan and China were invited to make work for me to fire, as well as a few local potters. After the kiln was unpacked and the work fettled, it was put on show in the Porcelain Museum. The exhibition is on until late June in the Porcelain Museum. The Museum Director released a short promotional video of the firing in time for the exhibition opening, which he posted up on-line and got over 4,000 hits the first day. So he is very happy.
One of my bowls from the firing, with the Korean location name stamp and my name in Korean
The Staff of the Museum took me out to dinner after the event. They are all such a pleasant bunch of people, I really enjoy their company, They are great people. As I don’t have more than a simplistic grasp of ‘Airport’ Korean. All our conversations are carried out using translation software on our phones. The local Korean app is called ‘Papago”.
We went to a local restaurant where the chef makes his own hand made noodles. It’s worth going there just to watch him work. It’s an entertainment in itself!
Before I left, I made my usual pilgrimage up the mountain to the historic site where porcelain stone can be picked up off the ground. I collect a bag full each visit, (10kg) take it back to my room and wash it thoroughly, scrub it well, to get any dirt off the stones, then soak it in chlorine bleach over night to make sure that they are sterile, before bringing them home. It only needs to be put through the rock crusher, then the ball mill with enough water to make a slip, and then stiffened back up to a plastic state before throwing it on the wheel.
Throwing stones! Powdered porcelain stone mixed with water, nothing else!
There is nothing quite like sericite. It’s such a unique material.
After finishing my work at the Porcelain Museum, I travelled up to the northern suburbs of Seoul, to meet up with my friend Sang Hee. She took me to her mothers farm, where we spent the morning weeding some of the rows of vegetables.
And a salient reminder that you never step over a fence line here! Even though you are in the suburbs. Not everywhere has been thoroughly de-mined and checked to make it 100% safe.
My last day was spent in Seoul, getting ready to fly out the next day. I went into the tourist area and got a couple of new name stamps made, as I lost all my older name and workshop stamps in the big fire.
Another very rewarding trip in every way. I’m so lucky to be able to do this work!
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever perfect and nothing lasts!
I’m working in Korea in this little artists village community on the edge of a country town. There have been potters here making and mining porcelain stone for 800 years. The village is located away from the township, such that the smoke from the traditional wood fired kilns is not a concern for the township residents. It was great forethought in its time to start to locate all the wood kilns up into this side valley.
But it doesn’t stop there, this has been a long-term plan and as with all long-term plans, it is evolving and adapting with current thinking and social mores. Hence my involvement here with the constriction of my low-emissions wood kiln firing designs and techniques. I was commissioned to start this work here, back in 2019, I was all set to come, but before I could start, we had the fire, then covid intervened. So I was unavailable for some years. But I’m back here again now the the plan is back on track.
My demonstration firing was very successful. In previous firings here the only fuel available to fire the kilns with was very dry 5 year aged local pine. The standard fuel here that everybody uses. It is a statement of fact here that dry pine is the only fuel that works in a kiln!
Last year when I was travelling around, I visited a famous potter’s studio, where they fired with wood. He had built a special pine fuel drying kiln, to desiccate his very thinly split fuel. He told me that it was his special secret, and that only desiccated pine could raise the temperature of the kiln easily. Other potters struggle with ordinary wood, but he had discovered the answer. I decided not to mention that I sometime throw water over the dry pine to get a better result! He had no concerns about making smoke. That was taken as a norm. All kilns make smoke, don’t they!
In the kilns that I have built here, the 5 year seasoned pine burnt furiously and it was very difficult for me to minimise the smoke. I managed it, but wasn’t at all happy with such dry volatile fuel. I enquired about alternatives. There is hard wood available in the form of oak and acacia. But no one uses it for kiln firing as it doesn’t work!!! That was the local opinion anyway! Meaning that it doesn’t work in the traditional kiln designs, used here, using traditional techniques. I thought that it might just be ideal for my purposes, for use in the down draught firebox.
For this most recent firing I had requested that both pine and oak be available, to give me options. There is also the possibility of using local acacia wood, But I was told that this is not considered be be a useful fuel for kilns. That made me more interested in trying it out. I said that it is one of the better fuels back in Australia, but that hasn’t cut any ice here as yet – apparently.
When I arrived, the oak and pine were stacked neatly in front of the kiln. A lovely sight. I started by using just 100% oak. Initially, I found that the oak burnt black and then smouldered. Just as everyone else had found. But I was perfectly sanguine about this, because my local stringy bark timber back in Australia does the same. In fact the locals wouldn’t cut it for use in their open fire places because of this. I quickly found that a blend of 80% oak with 20% pine was a good combination to get started with, using the flashy pine to keep the oak burning. This combo worked well from 700 up to about 1000 oC, when I cut the use of the pine back to just 10%, and finally at 1100oC, I was using straight oak.
This series of combinations got the kiln firing well, while still burning quite cleanly with almost non-existent traces of smoke from the chimney. Just the occasional waft of pale grey smoke.
Problem solved. I was able to fire up to cone 9 in reduction with virtually NO smoke, while firing in reduction. This is a notable achievement here. A lot of chatter and comment, firing in a wood fired kiln with no smoke, by using the oft’ maligned local oak. Applause all round. Who’d have thought?
Maybe the local acacia might even have been better? But that is a project for another visit.
There are two ceramic university campuses that are keen to follow up on this, as they are located in cities, and there is no possibility of being able to make smoke in their location. Downdraught oak firing might just do the trick.
Word gets about it seems. During the cooling period I got news that the opening of the kiln would have to be delayed from one day to the next, then from the morning of the appointed day, to the afternoon, as the Federal Minister of Culture wanted to be there to see the results unpacked, and he could only be available in the afternoon of the 8th. So when in Rome… I delayed the opening at his masters pleasure.
I’m certain that this is no accident. Of course, I don’t know, but it smacks of ‘realpolitik’ strategising. I’d bet that the Director of the Museum has organised this as a media event to promote the Museum. Politicians fund the things that they see, are involved in, understand, AND if it looks like a successful vehicle to advantage their own career. They want to be seen associated with it.
Just a thought! Call me cynical! But…
I remember some years ago. I collected some porcelain stone from here and took them back to Australia and made a large bowl out of them. I glazed the bowl with a subtle blue celadon glaze that I made incorporating kangaroo ash. A kangaroo had died on my property, so I calcined it and retrieved the local source of phosphorous from the bones. Phosphorous is known to enhance the optical blue in certain pale iron glazes like celadon.
I gave it as a gift to the Museum Director along with the story. This was my own private Cultural Exchange project. His Korean stones collected from this historic site, made into a pure sericite clay body glazed with my Australian kangaroo blue glaze. He loved it. He was so taken by it that he called the Premier and made an appointment for us to meet him and make the bowl a gift to him. Thus bringing the Museum into his field of vision.
We turned up just before the appointed time for our 15 mins of fame, and were eventually ushered into the Official Office along with newspaper reporters, translators, aids and other staff. I was duly introduced to the Premier, a little bit of small talk. He had been very well briefed and made appropriate comments. Then it was down to brass tacks. I handed over the bowl and he graciously accepted it on behalf of the Korean People. He said straight away that he knew next to nothing of Ceramics, but understood the significance of the effort that had gone into such an art work and its cultural exchange significance. He thanked me again and shook my hand. There was a flurry of flash bulbs going off to record this staged event.
He asked me how I came to be researching Korean Porcelain from this remote place. I replied that Korean porcelain is unique in the history of world ceramics. I came here because of the history of the place and the pots that were made here. You can only learn so much from books. I had to come to experience it. He smiled, so you knew about Korean porcelain from back in Australia? I said yes, once I learnt about it, I had to come. The Porcelain Museum here is one of the very few places in the world where this kind of study can take place. Mr Jung, The Director, is very supportive, open and inclusive. He runs a great institution.
The Premier was reflective for a second, then said. I believe that you can build pottery kilns that fire with wood and make no smoke. This is important for the environment. Mr Jung has asked me for more funding for this kind of project. If the Museum is so famous internationally, attracting research like yours,
I will fund it!
The next day, the newspapers had the Premier on the front page announcing the success of his funding initiative for his international artistic ceramic exchange program, for the very successful, now internationally recognised, Yanggu Porcelain Museum. Every one wins. The Premier gets all the credit and is in the paper looking like a hero. The Museum Director got his funding. I enjoyed the research and achievement of making the lovely bowl. The premier mentioned before we all left, that the best place to keep such a unique bowl, would be in the porcelain museum.
Back to the present time and hence the sudden flush of offers of work to build similar such kilns from established potters and university campuses. Once it is shown to work, it gets it’s own legs. Word travels fast. These days it travels electronically with likes and re-postings. It’s very fast.
The Minister of Culture is coming for a visit to the Museum and will be at the opening of the kiln. The kiln has cooled more than enough waiting for him to arrive. I’m introduced to the minister, he asks me in Korean – if I can speak Korean. I recognise the phrase, so I’m onto it, but my recall of Korean standard reply phrases is so slow, that before I can make my clumsy reply, he already knows my answer, so swiftly continues in English. “So we will have to speak in English then!”. I nod my thanks.
We make some small talk. He’s been briefed on hisc way here about the nature of the project and asks me if it is going well and I reply yes. That’s the depth of our interaction. That was my 15 seconds of fame! The photographers elbow in and I’m shifted sideways. The minister looks quizzically at the kiln and my Jung explains something in Korean. The Museum team are then given the go-ahead to unpack the kiln.
The firing is unpacked and everyone ‘oohs’ and ‘arrhs’, the other potters here each look in and turn to me with BIG smiles and thumbs-up. Huge sigh of relief. Everyone is all smiles. The pots are mostly well fired, but I’m interested in the minutiae of the detail. I’m looking not just for colour, but for the depth of colour in the celadons. Not just a shiny surface, but a certain quality of soft melt and satiny quality there. I want to get in and see the flame path and the flashing on the exposed surfaces and kiln shelves. Where is the ash deposit and how has it melted. None of this is possible with 50 people crowding around and flash guns going off.
Its a bit like a crime scene or perhaps an archaeological dig. You don’t want a rabble of untrained people trampling all the evidence and the details. Just like an aboriginal tracker, I want to read the ephemera, the subtle traces and shadows, but that isn’t going to happen. The pots are whipped out and shown to the Minister, with total disregard of their place in the kiln and their fire face and lee side qualities.
It’s just a little bit of a shame, as I’d like to learn more than I am able to in this situation. Looks like I’m the only one who isn’t ecstatic! I am really pleased that everyone else is so happy with the result, but I know that I can do better. But I need to read the surfaces to be able to learn what I need to be better at it the next time round.
In a perfect world, I’d like to go slowly and examine each pot in detail. These pots aren’t just trophies and trinkets, they are also part of my research, or at least they were when they went in! But this has become a media event now, and that is also very important, possibly more important, because it may well result in continued or even better funding into the future. A topic far more important than one firing and a few glazed pots.
The firing is a success, no doubts. Everyone is happy. They all leave feeling uplifted and maybe just a little bit happy and warm inside to know that they have been somewhere where there is some sort of mysterious, but positive, environmental action taking place. Even though they don’t understand what it is.
Back at the Museum tomorrow, I’ll have to have a quiet look at all the work as we are setting up the show. But the exact context will be lost, however, I can fill in some of the missing info using my experience. I’m so pleased that everyone is happy, but I could have learnt more to help them with the next firing, as the kiln still needs some fine tuning.
What I could see quite clearly, was that the oak ash was very refractory. I’m guessing that it is very high in SiO2. We may need to burn a bit more pine in the mix to introduce some CaO (calcium flux) into the eutectic to get a softer surface from the ash deposit. I was burning 20% pine in the early stages without smoke. I might have to keep that up for the whole firing? As pine ash has a lot of calcium in it.
All grist for the mill in the future. I could also see that the floor at the back was still a little bit under-fired, so I was up at 5,30 this morning and went down to the kiln and took out the bag wall and rebuilt it one layer lower and with one full brick removed, to make larger gaps. I will see how this works after the next firing. I also placed one brick in the middle flue hole to force the flame out to the corners more. All little fine adjustments that I hope will make it fire more evenly.
Another option for the refractory silicious ash problem might be to place a few tiny pre-fired stoneware cups containing a spoon full of Na2CO3 (washing soda) in the front of the kiln. This will mimic a few years of charcoal built-up and decomposition at high temperatures, where sodium vapours are released from the burning embers. The soda will sublimate and slowly volatilise throughout the firing, reacting with the silicious ash as it is being laid down and help it to melt. or I hope so anyway. Everything is an experiment!
I could also use common salt to get a similar effect, but sodium chloride creates a slightly different look. I don’t want to change the look of the ceramic surface from wood fired into salt glaze pots. But anything and everything is worth a try. At least once. I first came across this light salting technique being used in La Bourne in France, back in 1974, where they had been doing it for centuries. As a naive student, I thought that it was a very clever idea that I hadn’t come across before. Many potters have used it since. In fact, it has become part of the standard repertoire.
With the influence of the Minister of Culture on the front pages and the release of the TV doco soon, there will almost certainly be more enquiries about this firing method. It is my intension to try and leave the kilns here in good condition and with useful, technically accurate kiln firing logs that the students here can use to do their own firings in the future. Hopefully we can work together ‘virtually’ via ‘Kakao’ talk or Zoom to achieve the best result possible. It could be a whole lot easier if they would just read the book, or at least the first chapter on how to fire!
All that is required now is for some young enterprising Korean potter to pick it up and run with it, develop a small business building these kilns for whoever wants one.
Maybe firing a downdraught fire box kiln with local oak will become a thing? I have shown that it is possible. It is now one other possible strategy for potters and academics in the field, to follow to be able to keep on wood firing here into a cleaner, carbon constrained, and environmentally friendlier future.
All I need to do now is to introduce them to the concept of the after-burner/scrubber to minimise PM 2.5 particulates, not just smoke. But that is a bridge too far at this time and for this visit.
I’ve been invited back to Korea to build and fire another of my low-emission wood fired kilns and to do another demonstration firing of one of my previous kilns. The first of these firings was filmed by Korean TV for a documentary to be shown later in the year.
The firing for this kiln was done using the same 5 year old, very dry seasoned pine timber, that I used last year with the other kiln that I built.
It’s a considerable challenge to burn very dry timber like this, loaded with volatile resins, and not make loads of smoke. Not the best fuel for a clean, low-emission kiln firing demonstration. But that is what I was given to work with, so I did my best. It is possible to keep it fairly clean, but there is definitely some smoke. It takes a lot of skill.
Not recommended for the beginner. Still, everyone seems to be happy enough. The results were excellent!
It is possible to wet the wood to slow down the combustion and clean up some of the potential smoke, because water actually aids combustion when it is introduced at temperatures above 1100 oC. It’s hard enough too explain this concept of ‘water gas’ to students in Australia, using English language, which I’m better at than I am at Korean. Impossible using ‘kakao’ translation app in Korean. I started to try, but gave up after a few minutes.
A week later, I moved from Yanggu to Bangsan and went to work on my other kiln job.
While I was doing the 2nd demo firing, a famous celadon potter from down south drove 8 hours up to see and experience the firing. He had read the Korean translation of my book ‘Laid Back Wood Firing’ and was very keen to see it in action. He was clearly impressed, as he offered me a job to come back and build one for him later in the year. I declined. I have had 3 offers of kiln building work here this trip and two on the last trip. This could be my new Korea.
But I’ve decided that I’m too old for this sort of thing now. Kiln building is to labour intensive, it’s hard on my back. Especially on all the lower than waist height layers of brickwork, and it’s also somewhat stressful for me to organise all the important details in another language. There are tight deadlines and budgets, and doing it all using the phone translator app adds to the complications. I don’t need to do it to make a living any more.
I only came to do this job as a favour for my friend here, Mr Jung, the Director of the Yanggu Porcelain Museum and Research Centre. He has always been so supportive of me in my porcelain research interests. Mr Jung is keen to promote cleaner wood kiln firing. Tradition wood kilns here belch black smoke from start to finish. The two old traditional kilns built in the museum grounds in the township of Bangsan can’t realistically be fired anymore, because of residents complaints about the smoke. They are beautiful objects, like sculptures in their own right. The museum is located right on the main street, in the centre of town, making the smoke problem difficult to ignore. If I lived next door, I’d complain too.
2 items of beauty.
As with all things, these matters are complicated. Porcelain has been mined here and pots made and fired on this site for 800 years. It’s a hugely important cultural site. That’s a lineage impossible to ignore. However, the times they are a chang’in. Every one is aware of our carbon constrained, global heated, industrially damaged climate now, and air pollution is a huge problem, particularly in Seoul. There was a time when I first visited here, that everyone claimed that all the pollution was blown in by the westerly wind from China. It wasn’t Korean pollution! A convenient excuse to do nothing. (No-one seemed to notice that the wind wasn’t a problem on Sundays when there was much less diesel traffic in the city). But people have wised up. They want change. They want cleaner air.
Just after my first visit here, some years ago, burning pressed coal briquettes was banned as the main heating and cooking method here. The government did this by bringing gas to the town. They weren’t so stupid as to just ban coal. (See below). They offered a solution first up. Janine and I were working here at the time, and were particularly impressed by the speed and efficiency of the operation. The gas installers team progressed from one end of the main street to the other, about half a kilometre, digging the trench, laying in the pipes, installing side take-off lines to each house, company, or cafe as they progressed, testing the section, then back filling and finally re-tarring the road surface as they went, from laneway to laneway, in 50 metre sections, day after day. The whole street was done while we were there. No one was inconvenienced for more than a day or two.
I reflected on this and couldn’t help but think of Australia and making the comparison. It took 2 months for our local council to re-work the intersection of the street entry into our village at the level crossing. Less than 50 metres of tarred road. Terms like glacial come to mind. I think that the difference is that here, Korean’s work on contract and our local council workers were on wages, so no rush.
The lord Mayor of Brisbane also comes to mind, declaring homelessness illegal in Brisbane. Genius! give this man a PhD and a Nobel Prize! He did absolutely nothing to offer any alternative. No grand plan. No long-term thinking. No considered strategy. No forethought. No low income housing construction budget. Just get that problem out of my sight. I can only hope that he will ban cancer and war next!
No wonder we are the big brown dumb land that sells black and red dirt.
Back in The Porcelain Research Centre, the Director had a grand plan that involved long term thinking and strategy. The old disused army barracks on the far edge of town, up in a seperate little spur valley became available. He somehow organised to get it included into the Museum plans and therefore long term budget. Over the years he has relocated all the wood kilns and several more as well, to make a small porcelain village. With specialised facilities for wood firing. both traditional and modern innovative designs.
There are 6 seperate, self contained house/studio buildings, for research students and their families, a central communal meeting place/cafe, A huge accomodation block for visitors and guests during big events, Plus a seperate family guest house.
On this visit, I got to see inside the huge new, almost complete, student residency building, with 6 self contained single studios and living quarters, 3 either side of a massive central kiln room and glazing lab. Korean students can come to study for periods of 1 to 3 years. Foreign students can come from 1 to 3 months.
The construction phase is almost complete. They are just doing the landscaping now. This is becoming a very impressive place to come and study.
As I understand it. Local Korean ceramic students that are accepted into the program here are usually supported by their university to come here for higher degree research study up to 3 years for a PhD. They don’t have to pay any rent, but they have to cover the cost of their own firings and food. I’m unaware of the cost for international students, as the building isn’t ready yet, so there haven’t been any so far.
I’d come and work here again, as an artist in residence, if I didn’t now have an even better studio and creative environment back at home in my new workshop, just sitting there waiting for me. Now Janine and I are in a position to invite students to come and work and study in our studio from time to time. Regrettably, we can’t off the same standard of on-site accomodation as they do in Korea.
New Student accommodation building.
Is there any wonder that I love coming here to this supportive, creative, artistic environment so much?
Apparently numbers are beautiful, and can be fun!We had a visit from one of my very earliest students, who I hadn’t seen since graduation almost 50 years ago.
She had trained in maths at uni, but ended up teaching maths at school. This didn’t seem to be sufficiently rewarding to her, so she came into the Art School to train as a potter, teaching maths part-time to support herself during this 2nd lifestyle choice of vocation as a mature age student.
We had an interesting catch-up and she explained to me that numbers have a personality and are beautiful. She told me that she could look at a number and know a lot about it from its ‘character’, or something akin to its ‘personality’?
Numbers are like people, you can learn a lot about them just by the way that they look.
I’m not a maths person myself. However during our conversation, I started to understand a little bit more about the look of numbers and learnt that I do have some little bit of insight into numbers. When I was at school, we had to learn maths by rote. I never felt the desire to enquire further. So unlike my experience of learning about ceramics, which I couldn’t stop thinking about, pondering, romancing etc. in my spare moments.
These days, I usually only use numbers to defend myself. ie. to add up the bill and check it for accuracy. But I sometimes use my limited maths to understand the chemistry of clays and glazes, ie. Brongniarts formula, Segar formula, and electric kiln wiring calculus to build heating element systems. They are not ‘fun’ jobs, this is strictly work. So some of that rote learning does get regurgitated and applied to real-life practical questions. I’m pleased that I am able to put my mind to it successfully. So numbers are useful, but I don’t romance them.
However, I was amazed to find that although I know next to nothing about maths and have little interest in it, I do know something about the look of numbers. When I say, the look of numbers, what I’m referring to is the insight that you gain through familiarity, like the look of words. I may not know how to spell some words, but when I write them down, I can tell that they look either wrong or right. So I recognise that I do know more than I realise.
Here are some of the numbers that first came to mind, and that I realised that I knew the look of pretty well;
0, (zero) having read the book ’The nothing that is!’. I learnt that as a species we learnt to count to to describe and tally the things that we owned. Goats, for example. If I only own one goat, then I pretty well always know where it is. but if I was and early human learning to convert from hunter gathering to residual farming and herding, then I would need to be able to know exactly how many goats I had, where they were, and if one was missing, so counting became a useful and necessary asset.
It’s not a long stretch of the imagination to think about the farmer who owned no goats, didn’t need to count, so it took a very long time for the concept of ‘0’ zero to come into existence. No one really ever needed to specifically count the fact that they didn’t have anything. Who would believe that someone could write an interesting book about nothing!
Well, Robert Kaplan, that’s who! “The nothing that is- a natural History of Zero”.
3, my favourite number. Because there is something odd about it.
21, how old my truck is
61, the route that Bob Dylan metaphorically revisited.
66, the highway that black Americans used to escape, persecution, rape and lynchings, and sang about in the early blues.
666, the number of the beast!
667, the neighbour of the beast!
2000, the cost of registering, green slipping, insuring, and putting 2 new tyres on my old truck to get it through rego inspection today. I own it outright, but this is the cost of renting it back from the institutions that allow me to drive it on the roads.
I’m reading a book at the moment, all about probability! It’s a really interesting read. I’m enjoying it and even though its a very thick book, about 2” or 50mm thick. I’m racing through it, but I’m not sure that I’ll finish it. A week ago I would have said with certainty that I would have finished it quickly, but having read most of it now, I’m rather reluctant to make such a bold claim. I’m uncertain. The first thing I learnt from reading this book was that probability probably doesn’t exist!
‘The Art of Uncertainty’ is written by Sir David Spieglehalter FRS OBE, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University. Someone to take seriously indeed. The sub-title of the book is ‘How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance Risk and Luck’. I was lucky enough to navigate across it by chance and took the risk to disabuse my self of some of my ignorance.
I’ve never been a person blessed with a sense of certainty, I’m probably more of the perplexed personality type – if there is such a one? So I have really enjoyed reading Prof Spieglehalter’s explanation of chance, ignorance risk and luck. There is so much to it. After explaining each topic, he gives an example from real life, then reduces every example to a mathematical model basis, which is also really fascinating. I’ve never been that interested in maths, but Prof Spieglehalter explains it so well, I could follow most of it.
“Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does)
Life is uncertain. None of us know what is going to happen. We know little of what has happened in the past, or is happening now outside our immediate experience. Uncertainty has been called the ‘conscious awareness of ignorance — be it of the weather tomorrow, the next Premier League champions, the climate in 2100 or the identity of our ancient ancestors.
In daily life, we generally express uncertainty in words, saying an event “could”, “might” or “is likely to” happen (or have happened). But uncertain words can be treacherous.
Attempts to put numbers on chance and uncertainty take us into the mathematical realm of probability, which today is used confidently in any number of fields. Open any science journal, for example, and you’ll find papers liberally sprinkled with P values, confidence intervals and possibly Bayesian posterior distributions, all of which are dependent on probability.
And yet, any numerical probability, I will argue — whether in a scientific paper, as part of weather forecasts, predicting the outcome of a sports competition or quantifying a health risk — is not an objective property of the world, but a construction based on personal or collective judgements and (often doubtful) assumptions. Furthermore, in most circumstances, it is not even estimating some underlying ‘true’ quantity. Probability, indeed, can only rarely be said to ‘exist’ at all. All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is.”
Life is uncertain. All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others!
As probability probably doesn’t exist. I’m probably not too sure what the last chapter will tell me. If I finish the book!
We probably really don’t know much at all. Get used to it.
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing last forever.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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