K-Pot Journal 2

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Building my kiln went pretty easily. 

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.

K-pot Journal

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K-pot Journal

There is a world-wide phenomenon in international popular music that has taken the world by storm in the past decade or so called K-pop. A style of popular Korean music, loosely based on traditional Korean music styles, but greatly influenced by loads of Western music styles like hip hop, R&B, rock, jazz, even gospel, reggae, electronic dance, folk, country, disco, and classical. Every body seems to know about K-pop, this Korean cultural export.

I don’t know much about K-pop and Korean popular music, I come here to study ceramics, so I thought that I’d call this blog K-pot! On my first visit to Korea, 8 years ago, I wrote a blog called ‘The Kim-chi Chronicles’ (Sept 2016), This blog is its latest incarnation.

This is my 7th visit to Korea, since I first came here in 2016. I was here only 6 months ago for a ceramics conference, where I presented a paper on low emissions wood firing. This involves using a kiln with a downdraught firebox (Bourry box) which is capable of firing with relatively little smoke. Of course there is always some smoke when burning wood, but this style of kiln design keeps it to a minimum most of the time.

In Australia, where I have done most of my research, I use hard wood, eucalyptus trees for fuel. Eucalypt hard woods are heavy and dense. They burn slowly and steadily. Perfect conditions for low smoke emissions. Here in Korea, they have a lot of different softwoods in the form of pine trees/conifers. They burn fast and furiously, so it is a challenge to minimise smoke during firings.

People here have asked me what is the secret addition that you have incorporated into the kiln? As if there is some sort of afterburner, that they can add to their own kiln to clean it up. There is no secret addition! It is a complete kiln design incorporating the virtues of the down draught firebox that burns the wood more or less in stages, so that there is no intense emission of volatiles that causes smoke in most other kilns.

So I am here again in Bangsan, in the Yanggu Porcelain Village, this time not as an artist-in-residence, as I have been in the past, but as a kiln building tradesman, a glorified refractory bricklayer. I have been tasked with the job of building a small kiln here that demonstrates that wood burning kilns can be fired with a minimum of smoke.

This project was first floated way back in 2018, when the director of the Yanggu Porcelain Museum and Research Centre, Mr Jung Do-Sub, asked me if I would be interested in such a project. The Museum had purchased the rights to publish my book, Laid Back Wood Firing, and had it translated into Korean. They have also published my other books ‘5 Stones’, and ‘Rock Glazes, Geology and Mineral Processing for potters’.

Unfortunately, The translator took someone else’s advice and renamed the book “Smokeless Wood Firing”. Which is of course not true. all wood creates some smoke when being burnt. My project is to keep the smoke to a minimum. Calling the book ‘smokeless woodfiring’ only creates false expectations, and room for criticism and disappointment.

As a result of the books’ publication, there was some interest in getting one of my kilns built at the Yanggu Research Centre as a demonstration model. Like other places in the world, There is a growing interest in cleaning up the environment, at least from the grass roots level, not from there polluting industries, who are being dragged kicking and screaming to be made to be kept to account. It is this citizen-lead interest that is putting pressure on political leaders to make some sort of gesture to seem to be doing something, while still taking large donations from the polluters to keep the status quo.

The result is a very slow transition to clean up the environment. The results can be seen here in this tiny, remote village. When we were last here before ‘Covid’, in early 2019. The streets were being dug up and gas pipe lines being installed to every home and business. Previously, most home heating and commercial cookery was being done using pressed coal briquettes. Dirty, inefficient and polluting. The immediate result is much cleaner air.

These days the smoke from the wood fired kilns looks just as polluting, now that the residents have paid to have cleaner gas installed, to eliminate their smoke, why shouldn’t the residents want cleaner air, and less smoke pollution from every source? The traditional kilns here are very smokey, producing black smoke all the way through the firing schedule, from start to finish, particularly at the end of the firing, when the extra chambers of the climbing kilns are being fired by ‘side stoking’ methods.

There are two climbing kilns here in the centre of the village behind the research Centre and Museum. One of them right next to an ancient kiln site, where porcelain has been made since the beginnings of porcelain making here, hundreds of years ago. With an ancient tradition of pottery making here in the village, using these old kilns going back many hundreds of years, it’s hard to suddenly say NO! Just stop doing it. So the Director of the Museum, was thinking a decade in advance of this possible occurrence.

He managed to secure access to an abandoned military base, a few kilometres out of town, up a small valley, well out of the village, where a new

Smoke from one of the traditional kilns here.

‘Porcelain Village’ is being built. When I first arrived here 8 years ago, in this new development, the buildings were still very new and my room still smelt of fresh paint, and all the facilities were still being installed in what had been the officers quarters. One of the stone barracks was being converted to a meeting room and coffee shop. The Museum director had big plans to build several different styles of kilns out here to add to the research facilities available to the students. That has since then, mostly all come to pass. However, the plan keeps changing and expanding and getting more complex.
The Museum Director is a very smart guy, a good strategic thinker and politically very savvy.

The first kiln built up in the valley was a tunnel kiln. I didn’t see this kiln being built, as I have been away for 5 years because of the COVID lockdown, and then the huge catastrophic bush fires that burnt our pottery. It has taken me 5 years to recover, so that I could finally accept Mr Jung’s offer to come and build them one of my kilns.

The second kiln built here was a traditional low-firing, earthenware wood kiln, the design of which, originated in Jeju Island off the far South Coast of Korea. It is built out of basalt stones. The only available material on Jeju Island, so is limited to very low firing temperatures. A kind of tough earthenware.
Hand made fire bricks stacked to dry in front of the Jeju basalt stones kiln

The third kiln built here was a traditional 5 chambered climbing kiln, built almost entirely out of hand made blocks and bricks for the walls, and hand rolled cones of local fire clay for the dome and arches.


Hand made clay cone shaped bricks set out to dry in the kiln shed.

The 5 chamber domed climbing kiln getting ready for its first firing

There are 3 independent, self contained workshop/residencies for artists and their families, and another building with 4 bedrooms and 4 studios, suitable for single student residents. Each of the studios has it’s own electric kin and pug mill. There is a huge communal clay processing and kiln firing building with 2 large gas kilns, and finally a very large conference/residence building that can sleep up to a dozen people with large multiple bathroom, toilets, and even a sauna and laundry.

As far as I can ascertain, all the residents/students here have already completed MA hons degrees from their university, and have come here to study for up to 5 years to gain their PhD in porcelain research. It appears that they get rent free access to all the facilities here and only have to pay for their gas and electricity bills. An amazing deal. Such great support for the Arts here! In exchange, they are expected to take part in communal activities like the making of the hand made fire bricks for the last kiln built here. or making the years supply of small test tiles for glaze testing.

There are plans for the local government to develop and sell off several privately owned and developed house and pottery studio sites, next to the research facilities. There may be up to 8 or 10 of these house sites. 2 of them have now been taken up, and buildings are currently underway. It will become a small porcelain village and creative community.

My wood fired kiln is small compared to the vast climbing kilns here. But it is actually quite a large kiln of 85 cu. ft. or 2.5 cu. m. Very large for a single potter to fill regularly in Australia. However, I expect that it will be filled by group effort here, just like all the other big kilns. Mine will be the 5th wood kiln to be built on site here. A demonstration model of what might be possible in terms of reducing smoke pollution in wood firing, while still achieving reduced stoneware wood ash effects.

I only hope that it all goes to plan, However, I am mentally prepared to accept some smoke, as all the wood here is very dry pine, that will burn intensely, so I will have my work cut out to get a good clean result. I will be severely embarrassed if it all ends up going pear shaped in the firing. So far the kiln looks good and is built to the specifications that I usually rely on when designing similar wood kilns. But knows what will happen when I fire it with very dry pine fuel. I can only guess, but I imagine that there will be some smoke.

My finished kiln with 2 Bourry style downdraft fire boxes side by side.
Ready for K-pot firing. I have to wait and see what my decisions were like.

Not digital Native, but Dig it all native

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Dig it all native

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.

Fire and Ash – Sept 2024

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Lowe and Lee Gallery

Fire and Ash – Sept 2024

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.

Spring is Here.

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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. 

Repair, re-use, re-purpose.

Blackware, Blossom, Black truffles and Brassicas

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The nights are getting slightly shorter every day. The dawn comes a little earlier each morning and its now just on light when I wake up.

It a very nice feeling to sense the return of the sun, even though it’s just a hint.

The trees in the stone fruit orchard are starting to bust into flower. This time last month there was only just the one very early peach, but now there are several trees in flower. The almonds, peaches, nectarines and the first plum tree.

We also are enjoying a very pleasant display from my floral border plantings around the pottery retaining wall. 

Earlier this week, we ate the first of the new season asparagus. However, our main garden produce remains the brassicas, and will be for some time to come.

The peas have just started to climb the new twin wire trellis and have also opened their first flowers. So much to look forward to.

Last week we had a firing in the wood kiln with a bunch of amazing students. The weather held, and although it was crisp, it wasn’t too cold for the over night shifts.

After the unpacking, we all got stuck in and spent a couple of hours after lunch carting, stacking and splitting wood.

I had spent a couple of days during the cooling period, chainsawing fallen dead trees out in our forest. I had to do a bit of clearing to make a turning circle, and then snigging out the logs with chains into the clearing, to be cut up into ‘hob’ lengths for our bourry box fire box.

In the garden, I’m picking winter veggies, mostly brassicas and then dining on roasted vegetables.

In the pottery, I have been making some small batches of experimental new clay bodies based on my local weathered basaltic gravel that I make my Balmoral Blackware from. Just small 5 kg batches. I have no idea how they will turn out, but there is only one way to find out, and that is to make some pots out of them and fire them. I’m planning to fire them in the wood kiln before I go to Korea to work next month. If I can find the time to fit it all in in time. If not, then it will be when I get back.

Winter brings on the truffle season, so we are enjoying French Black truffles very thinly sliced over our beautiful chickens scrambled eggs. Just another black treat in this season. 

We keep the truffles in a container of rice in the fridge, so that we can the full truffle flavour in the eggs and the rice. The infused rice is used for truffle flavoured risotto for dinner.

I think that I prefer soft scrambles eggs on toast with the truffle shaved on top, but as we have two good sized truffles this year, we also try dicing and micro planning the truffle into the egg mix. I think that we get slightly more flavour in the eggs this way, but I rather like bending over my breakfast and inhaling deeply to catch the delicate fragrance while I can see the round black slices on top of the deep yellow of the eggs. It’s a feast for both the eyes and the nose.

Roll on the seasons. Next stop is spring!

Our re-built old wood splitter

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This last few of weeks, We have been teaching weekend workshops each weekend. Working in the garden and orchards in between time, but in particular, I have been re-building and restoring my formally beautiful hydraulic wood splitter. This machine was brand new and only used twice before the 2019 catastrophic bush fire. Our Lazarus wood splitter in the Phoenix Pottery Workshop. I need to get it going again, for our wood firing weekend workshop.

It used to look like this. All new and shiny.

Then after the inferno it looked like this!  Just the RSJ column of the splitter standing in a clearing in the burnt out forest, that used to be our kiln wood shed.

Today, with a lot of effort by my friend Ross, who rebuilt the hydraulic ram and other bits for me, it looked like this.

The 2nd hand tyres went flat every week and continually needed pumping up. I finally took them off and got inner tubes put in them. 

I replaced the burnt-out hydraulic control lever. This is the gadget that makes the ram move up and down. 

Then I turned up an adaptor unit on my metal lathe, made from some old aluminium irrigation pipe off cuts that I used for the new orchard netting frame. They were roughly cut to over-size with the angle grinder, then machined to exact tolerances. Finally I re-worked an old 3 HP electric motor that Ross gave me, making an improvised power adaptor/converter.

The last job was to give it a coat of zinc primer paint.

It is now functional again and running on sunshine, instead of petrol. So much better for everyone.

A damaged, but reliable, solid and still working, thing of beauty.

A self portrait! – without perhaps, so much beauty!

Repair, reuse, recycle.

Nina the Gleaner, purple potatoes and okonomiyaki

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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.

Clay making and tatami floor tea room

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We have been having some good cleansing frosts this last week or so. White and crunchy, this is good to clean out any remnants of fruit fly in the orchard. It also helps to set the chemical clock in the stone fruit trees that need a few hours of very cold weather to make the next seasons flowers fertile. This is called their ‘low chill hours’.

Inside, it’s been a busy time, as usual here. Janine is back from her trip up north, and I have been cleaning out the loft area above the clay making and rock crusher rooms. There is a space up there that is sort of a loft, but it was never intended to be a useful space. Just a way of enclosing the noise and dust from clay making and rock crushing in the small ground floor rooms. The space above them just had ’stuff’ stored up there. Mostly left over insulation bats and silver paper sisalation. Plus half a dozen mixed sheets and off-cuts of thin bracing ply wood, that I had used for the ceilings of the throwing room and gallery.

The only access to this ‘loft’ area was, until recently, by bringing in a ladder. A while ago the idea crossed my mind that we could use it as a place where students could sleep over when they stayed to do wood firings. 

In the past, before the fire, they used to pitch tents in the orchard, or stay in local bnbs. Sometimes, even sleeping in their cars.

We recently built a stair case to get up there safely. Using a lot of scrap timber, heavy duty ply, and our own home grown and milled pine boards that we had left over and stored. It turned out really well and cost next to nothing. I built it in two days with assistance of Janine’s brother John, a retired carpenter. I couldn’t have done it alone. John was the brains and I only assisted.

So while Janine was away I began cleaning it out and used the left over rockwool to insulate the ceiling/roof and then panel it with the ply wood. Amazingly, I didn’t have to buy anything to do the job. I was able to do it all by using what was already stacked up there! Even down to the box of ’TEK’ screws.

I started by building a safety railing/balustrade along the edge, using some off cuts of poly carbonate from the car port wall. 

Stuffing the rockwool into the roof was a bit like easing a compliant orangutang into the roof cavity, all soft and fury.

I used old tomato stakes from the garden to act as the extra several pairs of hands needed to hold up the ply wood, while I got the first few roofing screws into the sheets to secure them in place.

We were gifted the tatami mats from a lovely friend who didn’t need them anymore. They work really well in our new loft space. Both as a tea room space and as a place where students can choose to sleep, if needed.

We have also installed 2 single beds up there as well, on the other side.

A couple of years ago, I bought an old Venco pug mill from my friend John Edye, who has retired from making now. I cleaned it of aluminium corrosion and painted the inside with metal primer. I have use it for 2 years now and this week, I pulled it down, and cleaned it out to change clay bodies, and inspect the lining.

I was so happy to see that the wire brushing and priming that I had done previously was holding very well indeed. Nothing needed doing. So I put it all back together again and made a new batch of wood firing clay body for an up-coming workshop.

Clay making is a dusty business. I wear some OH&S clothing to minimise the dust in my hair and on my clothes. There are probably expensive versions of this stuff, but I use a garbage bag with holes cut out for my head and arms, then a theatre hair net and a standard dust mask. I have an exhaust fan with a flexible ’snorkel’ that hovers over the mixer and sucks most of the airborne dust out of the room. It works

After all the clay has been twice pugged, bagged and stored. We move all the machines out of the way and mop the floor clean, before reinstating everything as it was before and ready to go again.

Winter Weekend Workshops

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The ‘Pop-Up’ Open Studio sale is over and everything in the pottery has been put back to rights again. 

I can now think about when we can do the winter workshops.

This year has becoming somewhat shortened and a little bit complicated, by the pop-up, and the fact that we have been invited to work in Korea later in the year, possibly in September, or maybe October. We don’t have a set date as yet. So we can’t plan to hold any workshops much past August.

Weekend Workshops;

1/  Wood Kiln Throwing and Firing.

We are offering a combined 3 weekend workshop. 5 Days.

Throwing for wood firing, July 20/21 followed by a wood firing, Includes 15 kg of my specially formulated, home made wood firing clay.

Firing, 3rd/4th August. 

Unpacking Sunday 11th August.  $700. includes clay

The 2 week gap gives a couple of weeks to dry the pots, bisque and glaze them ready to return for the packing and firing weekend.

Pack the kiln. Saturday 3rd, then fire overnight into Sunday 

Unpack the kiln on Sunday 11th August.

If these dates fill, we may offer another weekend later on in the year? But timing is tight until we get fixed dates for the kiln building workshop in Korea.

2/ Sericite Porcelain Workshop

We are offering a weekend of throwing and turning fine porcelain. 

Throwing and turning fine white translucent sericite porcelain August 24/25th. $350 includes 15kgs of amazing white translucent sericite. Sorry FULL! It filled over night!

I have started a waiting list for the weekend of 27th/28th July for a second workshop.

I have 20 bags (15kg bags, enough to run 2 workshops) of a sensational, white firing and very translucent, single stone sericite paste body that has been in my barn since before the 2019 fire and COVID. Now with 6 years of age on it, it’s in very good condition, and throwing beautifully. 

Luckily, this clay was not stored in the old pottery, otherwise it would have been burnt like all the rest of my aged sericite stash, some of it was over a decade old at the time of the fire. Lucky also that this clay was in the part of the barn that didn’t burn. Such a fluke.

We are so lucky to have some of this aged fine clay available to us to share. 

3/ Introduction to glazes and glazing. Saturday 10th August. $125

A one day basic course on glazes and glazing techniques for beginners. Not too much theory, just half a day, then half a day of practical techniques. Glaze theory and chemistry can be very tiring, so I am limiting it to just half the day, followed by some practical techniques.

This is a one day workshop to keep it tight and manageable, if you are new to glazes and glazing. A good intro for a beginner.

Introducing the glaze raw materials, why we choose them, how we weight them and mix them, and then how we apply them.

4/ Introduction to clay bodies. Sunday 18th August. $125

A one day basic course on clay materials and clay body formulation for beginners. Not too much theory, just half a day, then half a day of practical clay testing techniques. Theory and chemistry can be very tiring, so I am limiting it to just half the day, followed by some practical techniques.

5/ Introduction to kilns, materials and firing schedules. Sunday 1st Sept. $125

A one day basic course on kilns, and firing for beginners. This course is all theory. So we will be breaking it up with coffee breaks and a look at at some different kinds of kilns and fuels, and their uses. We have several electric, gas and wood fired kilns here to examine and get to know. 

If you are interested in any of these weekend workshops. Please email me and I’ll send you more details. <hotnsticky@ozemail.com.au>

First in best dressed. Enrolment is only secured after payment is made. 

Sorry! but this is the only way that I can make sure of the numbers that is fair to everyone.