My Pots: Clay Is Not Dirt

I learned how to center clay on the wheel in 1977. I was at the time a monk. That is another post for another day. The person who taught me is currently the Abbott of the monastery. The person who taught him was also a monk, but of another monastery in Big Sur, California. We were all young then.

When I left the monastery in 1981, I found a job throwing pots here on the Oregon Coast. I also waited tables at a nearby resort. I was good at that job. I waited on Richard Avedon. That is my brush with celebrity there. I was affable. I was funny. We used to serve killer breads. Once, it was dill bread. I used to plunk it on the table, explain what it was, and ask my customers if they knew what they made that bread out of. They would shrug their shoulders and naively ask, "What?" "Dill dough," I would say. They would laugh.

Clay is not dirt. Clay is broken down rocks. Over millions of years, the rock is munched into tiny, flat platelets. They have ragged edges, but smooth surfaces. The presense of water lets them slide against each other. Billions of little tiles move when pressure from my hands exerts force. They go where I want them to go. When the water evaporates, they stick together. But it is only under the conditions of calcining that they fuse. All you have to do is bring the clay up to a red heat; when the pots glow, the clay becomes one. Forever. In this process chemically combined molecules of H2O are driven off. You can actually see the steam escaping in a tubular cloud through the upper vent hole of the kiln. Hold a piece of glass against the cloud and you will see water condensing. Also driven off are noxious sulphur gasses. It is never wise to fire off a load of pots in your kitchen.

The first fire is called the bisque, or bisquit fire. This process requires bringing the pots up to about 1900 degrees F. The pots are cooled, wax resist is applied to the foot of each pot, and then they are dipped in glaze. Glaze contains a goodly amount of different clays and fluxes such as borax, nephaline cyanite, gerstley borate, lithium carbonate, iron, copper, tin, iron chromate, koalin (which is where the word Kaopectate comes from---kaolin is the Chinese word for clay), and all manner of other possible ingredients that go into the glaze recipe. I created my own glaze recipies through lots of trial and tons more error. When dipped in the glaze, the wax resist repels it so that the pot won't fuse to the shelf during the firing.

My mentor from the "outside," Jeff Procter, used to say that the teapot is the ultimate example of a potter's abilities. He is correct. A teapot utilizes the cylinder, the fitted lid, a small bottle that turns into the spout, and attaching techniques with which are applied the handle and the spout. It's all there. Everything a potter can possibly do is carried out in a teapot. You can consider the lid a small plate or a shallow bowl.

The wall hanging platters are simply very large plates. I forgot to include my dinner plates, but they are simply small platters, right? The darker green platter measures 19 1/4 inches across; the pinkish one 18 1/4 inches.

The black bowls incorporate 30% local native clay from the banks of the Santiam River. Black iron oxide darkens the otherwise dark brown rendered by the iron rich native clay. These bowls are nearly all exactly the same size.

That floppy looking "art" bowl has a neat story. I botched a wide brimmed bowl and took it outside, set it on a stump and then shot it with my .22 Marlin target rifle. I have included two views. Can you tell which one shows where the bullet entered and which side it exited?

Every potter has his or her style bundled into the coffee mug. I am proud of this form. If you look closely, there are little notches excised with a cheesecutter along the lower edge, just above the foot. I like a deeply carved foot to raise the form off the table. Every one of my pots has a slight 45 degree bevel running along the circumference of the foot. This creates a shadow that visually prohibits the pot from becoming a part of the surface upon which it rests. Jeff taught me that. The swirl in the center of the pots is something you see in many, many potters' work. It is fun to see milk pooling in the troughs and breaking on the ridges of the swirl.

I like to make functional stoneware. Nothing pleases me more than knowing that people are going to be kissing my mugs, bringing refreshment to their lips and experiencing joy in their bodies.

I like to make tea bowls for the same reason.

I fire my pots to cone 8. Cone 6 is 2,194 degrees, so cone 8 is only slightly higher. Cone 10 is 2,350 degrees. So, it's somewhere in there. I fire in what is called an oxidation atmosphere as opposed to a reduction atmosphere. The latter involves a carbon based fuel such as wood or propane. During the glaze firing, the potter shuts off the flue, preventing the fire from escaping out the chimney and flooding the kiln space with carbon. This carbon actually enters on a molecular level the glazes and clay body themselves creating chemical reactions. A celedon, for instance, is simply a clear glaze with less than one half of one percent of iron oxide added. The reduction turns the glaze into a ghostly light green. A bright red is also created with about the same amount of iron, but in a slightly different glaze base. Blues are created by adding a similar amount of copper carbonate. In an oxidation atmosphere, there is no reduction at all. So the reddish, pinkish and blueish hues you are seeing are some magic that I had to work out chemically in the creation of my glazes.

There are these things called cones, hence, cone 6, cone 8, cone 10, etc. They are white, tapering triangular 3 inch towers made of composites designed to begin melting at exactly those temperatures desired by the potter. Three of them are placed, wide bottom first, into a pat of wet clay, then set on the shelf just inside a spy hole. The lead cone is called the guide cone, the middle, the target cone and the third, the guard cone. When the guide cone begins to bend, it is time to start paying close attention. I like to fire until the middle cone is touching the back of the guide cone, almost flat, and the guard cone is bowing its tip toward the group of two ahead of it. Perfect.

The temperature alone is not what makes the whole thing come together. The term is "heat work." This is temperature over time. And there is no cheating that part of the process. In life, it's the same. Some things require events over time.

As the kiln cools, you will hear pinging---the sound of the glaze shrinking beyond the shrinkage of the clay body. If a glaze does not fit the clay body properly it will sometimes just fall off the pot. Some crazing always occurs, but the clay body becomes vitreous to a less than 3 or 4 percent porosity. It holds water. The word "crazy" comes from this phenomenon. Too much tension and something has to give. You crack.

Once I found a mouse in my bucket of slurry. Poor thing couldn't get out and drowned. I encased it in slip, let it dry and then fired it off. That was cool.

Whelp, there ya have it.


I hope you enjoy the images, my friends.

(Sorry these don't enlarge when you click on them. I forgot that I used a zoon feature that reduces the pixel count. You can still figure out the bullet-shot bowl quiz though. G)