I currently have one of my bowls in a tea bowl exhibition in Seoul, South Korea.
This bowl was fired at the front of my wood fired kiln. During the firing the ash glaze ran just a little bit too much and stuck the bowl to one of its pieces of wadding. Luckily, I was able to chip it off without breaking the bowl. I repaired the damage using the ancient Japanese technique of ‘kintsugi’, using gold to repair precious pieces of ceramic.
Using pure gold to repair a damaged pot shows respect for the item. It honours the piece by giving it time and resources, and finally finishing it off with a coating of pure gold. By showing it respect, I choose to give it a greater value than it would have had, if it had come out of the kiln intact.
The pot is damaged, but it is still beautiful. It has Value, and it is Unique. It is Honoured even though it is Damaged. It’s possible that repairing a damaged thing can make it more beautiful and precious than if it hadn’t been through its ordeal.
I see these damaged and repaired objects as self portraits. I went through an ordeal and although I was damaged, and am not the same, I am still working. I’d like the think that I’m also improved by the experience, although I’m not too sure about that. My pots that I repair are certainly more beautiful, interesting and valued.
The pottery studio was all cleaned up and all the shelves were full for the recent Long Weekend Open Studio Arts Trail.
We are enjoying beautiful crisp and cold days here nowThe days are so much shorter and the nights correspondingly long. I light the fire in the lounge room almost every night. So that brings on the regular job of collecting, cutting, stacking and splitting fire wood. I use about one wheelbarrow of wood every two days. so I soon get through a pile. We are not short of wood. The catastrophic bush fire here 5 years ago killed hundreds of trees in our forest. The hard part is the dangerous job of felling them and then chain-sawing them up into suitable lengths. Fortunately, I have a good pile of sawn logs in hand and ready to split.
The overnight temperatures are getting down to 1 degree, tomorrow night is forecast to be zero oC but we are not getting regular hard frosts yet. In the 70’s when we came here, we used to get solid frosts starting in May and lasting 3 or 4 months. Those days are long gone, and with the crisis of global heating running rampant, I doubt that we shall see them again. It amazing to me that I still talk to a few die hards that seem to think that global heating is a media plot.
The disappearance of frosts here and the very early fruiting of our berry canes, up to 4 weeks earlier than they did in the 70’s are very obvious examples that we live with. The news that its the hottest year ever recorded. That record being broken year on year, the break-up of the ice sheets and the disappearance of the glaciers, yet one major party wants to withdraw from the Paris accord, presumably because they think that there are enough climate sceptic voters out there that will vote for the ‘fake news’ agenda? I wonder how bad it has to get before the penny drops?
I have done everything that I can think of, and can afford to do, to reduce my carbon footprint. It’s a huge undertaking to change your life around, but as I am a greenie, and always have been, I was brought up that way, long before the Greens were even thought of. I have been aware of the difficulty of addressing climate and environmental degradation for decades, so I started making the changes needed in my life slowly but surely over time. Replacing old worn out appliances one by one as they died. We started with a front loading washing machine that used much less water and power. I did my research and got one that didn’t need a heater, so we could use our own solar hot water. (most washing machines only have one cold water inlet hose.)
Next, in 1983 we replaced our 21 year old old VW beetle with a small 3 cylinder, 1 litre engine car. Very fuel efficient. We now have an electric car. In fact we have now replaced almost every petrol driven item in our life. Car, lawn mowers, chain saws, water pumps. The only petrol driven things that I can’t easily replace are the fire fighting pumps. They still need to be fuel driven to get the reliable independent high-power needed in an emergency. We have 17kW of Solar panels and 2 Tesla batteries. This is sufficient to run everything that we own including our 2 electric kilns and to charge the car.
It has taken 40 years to make these changes slowly, incrementally and painlessly. It would be wasteful to trash a functioning appliance with all its embedded energy while it still had life in it. If something isn’t completely worn out, it can at least be sold 2nd hand to someone who needs it, to keep it working and producing effectively until it is actually dead. One of the things that we have worn out is the hydraulic wood splitter. However, I took a chance and replaced the dead 5 HP petrol engine, after 10 years of hard work, with a single phase 3 HP electric motor – on a long extension cord. People said that it couldn’t be done. It wouldn’t have enough grunt. That was 20 years ago and that little single phase motor is still going strong, working well, and running on sunshine instead of petrol!
Where as a 4 stroke petrol engine has only one power stroke out of 4 revolutions. An electric motor has constant torque every revolution, so 3 Hp of electric motor is equal to 5 HP of petrol driven HP, or so it seems.
The garden is still feeding me with all the usual winter veggies.
I have even just picked, what may be the last harvest of tomatoes. But I’ve learnt to expect a few more ripe red tomatoes in amongst the thicket of weeds and herbs where self sown plants do well in the cold weather, avoiding the extreme chill. I don’t always see the fruit until it turns red, but they keep turning up, just as they have done in years past. I have also picked some of the last hot chillies and dried them to be cut up into fine fragments to add a pinch of heat to winter dishes in the coming months.
These cold short days remind me that is time to do the fruit tree pruning and spraying lime sulphur to deter leaf curl and shot hole fungus. some of the earliest fruit trees are already producing fruiting buds and the earliest blue berry bushes are already in flower, while others still have leaves on and are not yet deciduous.
Blueberry flowers in mid June.
Because I decided to live this ‘real’ hands-on life – as opposed to a virtual reality version of life. I am kept busy all the time with a series of activities that all need doing, one after the other, all through the year. Life has its cycles. I see them coming around ever quicker as I age. Tempus fujit indeed.
The garlic that I planted back in March is up and doing well, but is in need of its 3rd weeding session. Garlic doesn’t tolerate competition, so if I don’t keep the weeds under control, it wont prosper. I’m very fond of garlic. I eat a lot of it, so I need to grow a lot of it to keep up. I can’t bend down to do the weeding for hours at a time, so I just do the job in small bursts, a bit at a time, every few days.
I’ve just dug over another part of the vegetable garden and planted the 3rd batch of brassicas. I have to keep popping in a few more of each type of brassica every so often to ensure a steady supply of winter greens. I read recently that brassicas have a long cultivated history, going back to the Greeks and Romans.
I grow my own food, I built my own house, I learnt to repair my own laptop, washing machine, lawn mower, and other appliances. I have always serviced my vehicles. These are gentle but radical acts of rebellion and defiance of a wasteful system that is designed to keep us all in debt and is filling the world with polluting waste dumps of superseded consumer items, filthy air, polluted water and an overheating climate. We all need to do better.
On the Long Weekend I will be opening our Gallery for the ‘Pop-Up’ Open Studio Arts Trail.
I have been hard at it making new work for this show. I have been making some very fine and thinly potted bowls decorated with the motif of “From Flames to Flowers’. This is a motif that i developed without knowing last year after undergoing some remarkable EMDR trauma therapy.
One week I was painting flames on my pots, the sorts of images that had been haunting my dreams since the fire, then the next week, after just a few sessions of EMDR, the flames had morphed into flowers. To be truthful. I had made a concerted effort to plant patches and strips of English cottage garden beds around the garden and driveway since the fire to try and make the place a bit more cheery and less blackened. I really needed cheering up, having been burnt out 3 times in 50 years.
I really like the motif, so I am still using it. It still cheers me up. It’s optimistic and positive. I have added a little bit of gold lustre to give it a bit of ‘bling’ as well. I have been using some lovely translucent sericite porcelain, so that when I hold the pots up to the light, I can see the painting on the out side of the bowl from the inside, not just the outline of the image, but even the colours of the flowers. They are pretty special to me.
The other work that I have been doing is black and white sgraffito graphic decoration, again mostly on porcelain, but I have also made some stoneware mugs. They are still in the kiln as I type. They’ll still be warm on Saturday morning, coming straight from the kiln.
The motif for this series are the cherry trees in our Chekhov orchard, and the blue/black bowerbirds that come and steal our fruit. The Cherry Thief. The subject is as old as gardening itself. I remember that William Morris designed some wall paper back in the 1880’s called ‘the strawberry thief’. This new work of mine is totally unrelated in Character, and very different, but the subject is exactly the same.
I call the series, ‘Plant it and they will come’. And they do come.
When we came here 48 years ago. There were hardly any birds here, just a few kookaburras. As we developed the gardens and orchards, dug dams, made compost heaps and planted native shrubs, we created habitat, and they came! Suddenly we had to start thinking of how we might cover our fruit trees and vegetable beds from the marauders!
Within a few years, we had hundreds of birds living here, working the rich environment, with dams for water, open spaces to forage in, trees and shrubs for cover, and fruit to eat. We created this oasis and they occupied the territory. We planted it and they came!
I will be open from Saturday to Monday over the long weekend, from 9 to 5 each day. Please call in if you are in the area.
I have plenty of off-street parking, tea, coffee and cake, toilet facilities, and we are wheel chair friendly. There will even be a glass of wine in the afternoons.
I have a new book available now on the topic of my Small Portable Woodfired Kilns.
I have been working on this book for some time. It was started before 2019.
However, I was so caught up with the clean-up and then the re-building, after the catastrophic bush fire that destroyed our place, that I was not able to get back to the book until recently.
I get at least one email every week enquiring about my blog posts on the topic of these little portable wood kilns.
They seem to have the potential to become very popular, given the number of enquiries that I get about them.
Before the fire in 2019, I used to build and sell these little beauties. I used to build 10 or 12 of them at a time, in big batches, to make it most efficient and to keep the price down.
It turned out that I had quite a bit of descriptive writing about them, mostly cobbled together from my blog posts, but, I needed to do a bit of technical drawing to draw up the details of the two final designs, including the dimensions. The plans were never properly drawn. I just kept on adapting the previous plans by hand as the ideas flowed into reality, developing kiln by kiln.
Finally, I spent some time trawling through my photo albums to extract all the step by step images that I needed to illustrate the text fully with the detail of information that a keen amateur kiln builder/hobbyist might require to understand the full process of assembly.
During the decade that I spent developing these little kilns, I started from a very basic first attempt, and slowly worked on the design, improving it and polishing it. over several years and 12 iterations. I finally ended up with two different kilns, both good, but slightly different. One smaller, and the other larger. These little gems are capable of firing to stoneware, cone 10 in just a few hours.
Our fastest firing to stoneware was 2.5 hrs, using just one wheel barrow of sticks. However, I think that the results are better at around 4 to 5 hours and 2 to 3 wheel barrows of sticks. All the details are in the book.
Janine and I are recently returned from Korea where we were invited to take part in the Mungyeong Ceramics Festival, where I delivered a paper to the ceramics conference there about low impact wood firing.
My paper concentrated on my research into small down draught fire box design, intended to minimise smoke and pollution as much as possible. I also presented my current work on afterburners and scrubbers to try to minimise particulate pollution from our kiln chimneys.
I believe that these topics will become more important over time as Global Heating and carbon in the atmosphere starts to become obvious and difficult to ignore. Even to conservatives.
My paper was well received and I got some good interrogation during the question time afterwards. My book ‘Laid Back Wood Firing’ was translated into Korean about 5 years ago and has been available there for some time, so some people there had read it and were up to speed with the concept.
Janine and I will be returning to Korea later in the year to build one of my small Bourry Box kilns as a demonstration of how it can work. It will be built alongside several older traditional wood fired kilns. They are interested to compare the smoke from our firing and also the fired results afterward with that from the traditional kilns.
The most recently built, traditional, multi-chamber kiln was fired while we were there. It smoked all the way through the firing. I’m pretty sure that we can do better!
Its a really beautiful kiln to look at, and is constructed using the very old method of using cone shaped hand made ‘bricks’.
The cones were all made on site by the students/residents in the ceramic research centre at the Yanggu Porcelain Village.
The use of cone shapes allows for a rather nice dome shaped top or 3D arch over each of the fire box and 4 chambers.
The freshly built kiln took just 24 hours for it’s first firing – all 4 chambers to stoneware, absolutely no technology was use. No pyrometers or cones, just an experienced firing crew and home made draw trials of glazed tiles pulled at 30 minute intervals after orange heat.
This kiln was so new, it was still wet, and steam was coming out of all the cracks all the way to top temperature.
Side stoking is always a dirty business. Hard to get around that. It’s the nature of the beast.
That is why I have chosen to build a single chamber bourry box fired kiln as the demo model.
It will be a larger sized chamber, so I have designed it with 2 fireboxes side by side.
Only time will tell if it works the way I intend and if it impresses them.
When you are in Seoul and the air quality is rated as ‘fair’, but you can only see for 1 km through the smog. I makes you think about what a bad day might be like. Smoke from wood firing is not the big problem in the scheme of things.
We have just completed the 2nd of our sericite porcelain workshops. They both went well and everyone seemed to get something out of it.
We advertised it as intermediate to advanced level, and everyone was suitably skilled to be able to handle the slightly more complex and difficult advanced techniques.
We were aiming to teach those advanced techniques, and everyone was keen to extend their skills.
The weather has cooled down a lot recently, so we had to light the stove to get the air a bit warmer in the studio over night to speed up the drying process. At the end of the first days throwing. I lit the fire and kept it going until after 10pm with the ceiling fan running all night. With this combination of warm air and moving air , we managed to get nearly all the pots dry enough to start turning on Sunday morning.
As my contribution to our shared lunchtime meals. I cooked a couple of tarts to be shared for our lunches.
I made one savory home grown spinach and cheese tart from our garden with 3 cheeses. Ricotta, for the main filling with finely diced fetta for a little bit of texture, then some gorgonzola for a little of that tangy flavour that it imparts.
The other tart was sweet for after lunch, and made from our home grown and preserved quinces in an almond frangipane base.
Both made in blind baked puff pastry casings. They dissapeared pretty quickly. It’s a very good feeling to be able to share our preserved summer garden goodness and excess with others.
During the week inbetween the workshops, I continued to make and fire my sgraffito porcelain pieces that I have been working on for a while.
It’s good to see more of them coming out of the kiln now, all shiny and transparent with the images of the bowerbirds stealing our cherries from the Chekov orchard.
I will be taking part in the ‘Pop-Up’ Southern Highlands Arts Trail Open Studios sale on the long weekend of 8th, 9th and 10th of June. Save the date!.
Just like everybody else on the east coast of Australia just now, we have had a lot of rain.
Luckily, we only had 165mm. Some places had double that. But ours came all in a short sharp deluge over night. It fell onto saturated soil.
So the water flowed freely across the ground and down the slope into our dams.
The dams soon filled and overflowed. We now have 3 new streams flowing across our land. They will not be permanent. All this water will soon drain away, but we will not be able to drive a vehicle, or even a ride on mower down there for a very long time.
Because we can’t work out side at the moment. I have been prepping for the up-coming sericite porcelain weekend workshop.
I stripped down the stainless steel twin auger pug mill and cleaned out the previous porcelain body mix. The Venco twin auger pug is very quiet and very fast at processing clay. I really like using it, but I don’t like having to clean it out! It is one of the slowest pugs to take to bits and clean out.
Twin auger design pugs are very good at mixing/puging. The sericite that I am working with now is 8 years old and although it was well wrapped, it had stiffened a little bit over time. An excellent feature of the twin auger design is that you can just dribble in extra water in with the stiff clay to soften it up. Normal single auger pugs that I have don’t handle this very well. I’ve tried it. The clay/water mix just slides around and no mixing takes place. However this is not the case with the twin auger design. One other very important feature of this pug mill is that it is entirely fabricated out of Stainless steel, so very suitable for use with porcelain bodies.
I spent half a day getting it working and puging the 1/4 of a tonne of porcelain, ready for the workshop next weekend.
I bought this pug mill 2nd hand after the fire. It came from a deceased estate. I was dying to own one of these stainless steel twin auger pug mills, and was lucky enough to find someone was dying, to sell it to me.
We have completed the 2nd wheel throwing weekend workshop here in the new pottery.
We are recently returned from the Easter long weekend at the National Folk Festival in Canberra. Beautiful music, and a chance to catch up with old friends that we haven’t seem since last years festival.
Now it’s back to work in the pottery finishing off some sgraffito pots that I left unfinished in the pottery damp cupboard. It’s a great luxury to have a damp cupboard in the pottery. We managed to get by without one for the past 48 years here in Balmoral Village in all 3 of our previous potteries, where we lived and worked on earth floors. I am very grateful to my friend John Edye, who sold me his beautifully crafted wooden damp cupboard with a water bath in the floor. It looks good and works a treat. Thank you John.
I’m enjoying the sgraffito decorating technique that I learnt from my friend Warren Hogden a few months ago, when Warren and Janine taught a sgraffito slip decorating workshop here. I was the TA, assisting at that workshop. But I was really engaged and enthused, so have tried my hand at this lovely, gentle technique, and I’m really enjoying it.
Thank you Warren and Janine.
I’ve been engaged with the idea of the bower birds stealing cherries from the orchard.
We have just completed another weekend workshop. This time a throwing class. I advertised one and filled two weekends, so we will back in the studio again with the 2nd group next weekend for the 2nd one.
Everyone seemed to enjoy them selves and got something out of it. We had Len Smith here with us for the weekend to have 3 tutors for the 8 students. Len has so much teaching experience, it’s great for the students to have a third point of view. He’s also great company.
I spent the week pugging clay and prepping the throwing room, and during the time in-between, I kept on with my sgraffito decoration, and got a solar powered, stoneware glaze firing done.
These red and black cups are experiments in a combination of Sgraffito and inlay.
Just black slip inlay on these cups.
Just sgraffito on this bowl
In the evenings, I made another batch of tomato passata. I have now run out of our re-cycled ‘pop top’ jars and so I have started to use the old ‘Fowler’s’ vacuum jars with clip top lids. I made a 7 litre boiler full, and reduced it down to 5 litres, enough to fill 7 of our No.27 Fowler’s jars. I have no idea how Fowlers came up with their numbering system, but as they are so old, I suspect that it represents fluid ounces?
I Googled it and 27 imperial fluid ounces = 770 mls. So that sounds like it ought to be right.
I also made this weeks loaf of rye bread.
For the workshop lunch, I made a flan or tart with a baked cottage cheese base and a ratatouille topping. That didn’t last very long.
The coming week will be more of the same as we repeat it all over again.
The workshop is all cleaned and mopped and ready to go.
The workshop looks beautiful tonight in the glow of the pink sunset.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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