Pottery

Making pots again

Started making pots for the wood kiln today, after spending some time making a list of what needed making, and working on some sketches and sizing.

These are the beginning of the first items on the list, I wanted to get more done but spent much of the day cleaning up the studio after the gas kiln unloading. This is a very typical Karatsu shape, and you see them from very small all the way up to very large. These are 19cm and 16cm sizes.  As you can see from the pictures most of these plates will probably get brush deco and feldspar glaze (cone 6, give or take), some others will get rice straw ash glaze (cone 11, give or take)

glaze crawling a bit

There was a bit of an issue with crawling over one of my clay bodies, when raw glazed. The guinomi toward the front of the kiln had this problem, but melted enough to look interesting. These bowls at the back just look dangerous. I left them after the last firing, but finally got them out yesterday and had a nice cathartic smash fest.

Cupholders

How do you know your kiln is a luxury model? When you built it/had it built, did you really think of everything? How do you know that you have THE KILN that shows everyone you are a winner? a behemoth in the clay world? a demigod of ceramic art? Why, cup-holders, of course.

Doodling

Every once in a while, I find myself flipping through some of my old pueblo pottery books and without fail I end up obsessing on this one geometric design motif. I’m not sure what it is supposed to be, but for me it is lightning. I don’t know why, but I really like it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into the Karatsu tradition all that easily. However, starting today I decided to start doodling with this motif until I come up with something suitable to work into my pots.

This last trip to Korea gave me a lot to think about regarding carving and inlay. There were a couple of boxes I’d made a few days back, and these are going to be experiments with inlay and aforementioned motif. The carving is not great, but it’s a start. The way that the slip fills in the rough cuts to create soft curves is very interesting to me, and the feeling of scraping away the surface of the piece to reveal the inlay design is surprisingly satisfying. Since the claybody on these boxes is porcelain, the normally white slip has some benigara (RIO) mixed in to make it red.

This box will probably get fired in a saggar with charcoal and a feldspar/soda ash glaze. Will post pics of the finished piece if it makes it through the firing, and it is not too embarrassing.

Washing your Oribe

Sounds kinda dirty, somehow, or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, when you fire Oribe greens, you usually get an oxide layer over the surface that dulls the color, or in extreme cases changes the color completely to a sort of what I always imagined the color of the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo River to be. (always loved Rudyard Kipling)

The traditional method for cleaning this up is chestnut husks soaked in water, which creates an acidic, extremely smelly brown concoction that you soak your dishes in for a few days. Nowadays, people use a 3% solution of hydrochloric acid. Now, this is nasty stuff so if you are going to use it, use it in a very well ventilated area, with gloves, eye protection, etc… When you open the bottle, white mist rises, just like in the movies. Breathing that is not a good idea.

Here is a before after pic of a dish I cleaned up. These dishes did not have a heavy oxide layer, but the cleaned one is noticeably brighter.

Kamadashi / and a nasty case of the runs

I unloaded the kiln yesterday evening, confirming my suspicions about my glazing skills. While I got some good smaller ‘souvenir’ level work out of the kiln, the chawan and guinomi were for the most part not so good. These are the higher yen items, so I like to get more of those than less, but it does not oft happen. Two problems with them this time: the iron glaze was a bit thin, because the water was a bit too deep in my foot soaking dish, and my band of rice straw ash glaze at the top was a bit too thick.

The pieces that I needed for the upcoming show were the small dishes and yunomi, and for the most part they came out great, aside from about 10 that really ran, and had super duper pinholing. The smaller dishes that I tried out my copper green on turned out nicely as well, looking like a cross between an Oribe green and a Nuka Seiji.

I’ll post pictures of some individual pieces in the next few days, but for now here are the unloading pictures: