Extreme potting – a weekend’s madness
When
you think of the madness of extreme sports – if you ever do –
Niagaran white water rafting, Pyrenean street luge and even volcanic speleology
may spring to mind: deep potholing yes; pottery no. But if you were lucky
enough to be involved in this year’s EAPA potters’ camp, you’d
have a different tale to tell – one of extreme temperatures, rainfall,
explosions and other delights on the edge of sanity. In short, it was another
great success.
Diesel:
This year, the large
oil-powered salt kiln that we had previously used was pressed into service for
one of the two soda firings under the expert supervision of Rebecca Harvey.
Whereas last year this was a bit of an unknown notion for all of us, the whole
thing went swimmingly. The kiln gods blessed us with a near perfect firing
– orange peel textures, rich oranges and even blues and only one cracked
pot. That was mine, but I got my own back in the wet firing.
Gas:
The smaller kiln that we used for soda last year also
gave top results – only the unfounded fear of a roof collapse echoed last
year’s fragmentary kiln shelf debacle. This kiln had a dead spot at the
front that the soda shunned. Not this time, though, thanks to Jerry drilling a
hole in the door while Rebecca stood by with a vacuum cleaner to suck stray
bits from the pots inside. Nothing extreme or remarkable about that, you may
say, until you realise that the kiln was at 5000C and climbing at the
time.
Wood:
The wood kiln always provides
entertainment. This year, the chimney had to be re-attached following winter
gales, and all the ceramic buttons holding the fibre in place had to be
replaced to stop their rather uncouth habit of exploding. Swinging the chimney
into place from Jerry’s pet JCB could have been the stuff of nightmares,
but once again the kiln gods smiled.
The plan this year was to take this
kiln up more slowly to reduce bloating and get better ash effects – it
largely worked and thanks to the weather being a bit milder stoking was less
frantic. Even so, the chimney glowing red-hot betrayed the heat work inside the
kiln. Again, the results impressed, both for quality and volume. That kiln
swallows a massive amount of pots – and spits them out in rather better
condition than the baked potatoes in the firebox. Cone 10 spuds,
anyone?
Seaweed:
Meanwhile a certain dog food
salesman, Frank Logan, was filling oil drums with sawdust, copper carbonate,
salt-soaked rags, seaweed, wood, dog food and pots for his above-ground pit
firings (that doesn’t sound a bit mad, does it?). It’s certainly
safer and easier than digging a large hole in your garden, but I did miss the
cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof approach to the kiln opening. The results were every bit
as good as in the conventional pit, and the drums are more suitable for a
domestic-scale firing – and who knows what the dog food
added?
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Mark
Boyd's Soda Kiln...
... and it's mobile!
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Water:
When I were a lad – indulge me, folks–
there was great schoolyard debate about the signs of madness: hairy palms,
belief in an alien past or horoscopes, etc. One poor lad was so concerned that
his touching eyebrows betrayed incipient insanity that he started shaving
between his eyes before his chin. This confirmed to his friends that he was
nearer to the edge of madness than the rest of us.
Now, there is an
accepted wisdom that to take a wet pot fresh from the wheel and place it
straight into a soaking wet Durox block kiln, itself made within the same hour,
and whack the heat on as high as possible is a more tangible hint of lunacy.
Surely such pots would not, indeed, should not, survive.
The Durox block
kiln was simplicity itself to build. Three times over the weekend the kiln was
formed, moved and reshaped. Although fragile, the blocks stack neatly for raku
and biscuit kilns. Even when soaked with water inside and out and blasted to
orange heat for 30 minutes, the kiln remained cool to the touch.
Sadly,
I can’t report any great counter-intuitive shift in the firing’s
success. First time round, every single pot exploded, showering a giggling
audience of told-you-so potters with hot shards. This firing rose to a dull red
heat in 20 minutes, but the remnants of the pots had that microwaved chicken
quality – crispy on the outside and tepidly salmonellic on the inside. The
most complete pots (yes, I am looking for small gains here), not surprisingly,
were made from Crank.
Undeterred, a second firing ensued in a rebuilt,
smaller kiln. This time we sprayed water into the kiln during the early part of
the firing and cooked the pots for a full half an hour, up to a dull orange
heat. However, most pots displayed similar split personalities to the first
firing. The talk was of creating mosaics or a beach – the V-word was
heard: volcano not vessel.
What some people didn’t see, though, was
that lurking on the lower shelf, in the midst of the sauna and debris, four
small pots did survive. Of these, two were crank pinch pots a couple of inches
tall, one of which had a raku glaze mixed in with the body. The other two were
also pinch pots, but made from paper clay, and one of these was the best part
of a centimetre thick. So, wet firing can be done and is perhaps worthy of
further investigation.
Luckily, I wear glasses. They protected my eyes
but didn’t save my eyebrows from a singeing. I may appear to have shaved
my brows and be the owner of heat-warped spectacles, but it’s just a sign
of extreme potters having fun.
And then it rained
On the Sunday,
the heavens opened – wet firing indeed for the morning’s raku.
Judging by the interest in the raku, that was also highly successful. Sadly,
neither of the paper clay pots from the wet firing made it into the raku kilns,
but I suppose there is no point in upsetting too many conventions in one
weekend.
Finally, I must mention the atmosphere at these potters’
camps. Whether oxidising, vapour-laden (soda or alcoholic) or reducing they are
always convivial. The social gathering on a balmy (not barmy – remember my
eyebrows no longer meet) Saturday night with an excess of bacchanalian jollity
all confirms that EAPA events are as extreme and as mad as most humans can
handle.
Mark Boyd.
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A good firing.
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