Help from "The Complete Potter"

The Complete Potter is a book which I possess and mostly talks about throwing techniques and building techniques, but has a few things to say about firing, at the back.

This book said some interesting things. I have learned that the smoky effects come from the small combustibles, with a high ratio of surface area to volume, like sawdust and newspaper, while the actual heat comes from the larger ones like sticks and logs. It also suggests covering the pit with a metal lid to keep the heat in. I can't get a piece of metal sheeting by tomorrow, so I'll have to go without, but if I don't like the effects from this first firing I may get one before I do another. Finally, it reinforces the danger aspect of the whole proceeding: you are working with massive open flames, the smoke of which contains volatilized chemical compounds like gaseous hydrochloric acid, if you use NaCl on the pieces, and others. So precautions should be taken, and I will take them. I have a respirator to wear, will keep my dogs away from the fire (obviously), won't be an idiot and try to unpack it while it's blazing hot inside, am keeping the pit away from my wooden fence, clearing the area before lighting the fire, making a ring of stones and raised earth around the outside so that it doesn't wander, and just generally doing everything I can think of to prevent loss of life/limb/dignity.

Before firing, some research

This is from the "Pit" section of the marvelous book Alternative Kilns and Firing Techniques, by James Watkins and Paul Wandless.

Pit firing is simple and very, very old, and most cultures have some variant of it. In Mexico burnished work is sort of sandwiched between layers of wood above the ground, then lit like a bonfire. In parts of Africa the pots are stacked aboveground and covered with brush and grass and any other dry plant material, and that is then burned. Firing in the ground means the earth acts as an insulator, so the fire can burn hotter. One effect of this is that colors become more pronounced, not just black and gray.

There's some minimal history; now on to the logistics. Watkins and Wandless (W&W) say to dig a hole as deep as it is wide, say 24", and fill the bottom with a three-inch layer of sawdust (more on that soon), small twigs, and newspaper. I have an abundance of twigs and my boyfriend is kindly saving his newspapers for me as I do not get the newspaper.

In an electric kiln the wok is placed upright, on shelves, but here I'll be doing something called tumble stacking, which means using no shelves and packing the pieces in there so they look haphazardly placed - but are really very carefully placed indeed, with sturdier/larger ones on the bottom, and as little of their area touching each other or the walls of the pit as possible. (Areas cut off from the smoke will not get the colorful effects as distinctively.)

Then you pack the pit around the pieces, with layers of straw, sawdust, and newspaper, according to W&W. I'm going to use kindling instead of straw, and I don't know how much sawdust I'll have, but I'll make sure that I get a lot of small combustibles of one kind or another. This packing will also help ensure that they stay stacked as they are, and that the wood which will be placed on top doesn't fall and crack them. (I hope, I hope, I hope.)

You then stack some of the larger wood pieces on top of the pile, which should be at ground level. Soak them with lighter fluid (I don't know what's in that, I don't have anything specifically designated as such, I'm going to use gasoline) and toss in a match. According to W&W the fire should burn for about an hour, but stay hot for many hours after that. It will reach temperatures between 1000 and 1350 F.

It is very very VERY important not to unpack the pit too soon, for safety and more importantly because the sudden temperature differential will cause the pieces to crack. I have witnessed this with electric kilns. So I must overcome my curiosity and let the pit cool overnight at least before seeing what I have wrought.

Over Break

I dressed my pieces, the fourteen that I had available to dress at the beginning of break. There are a total of sixteen more in varying stages of dryness in the school studio. One of them is cracking, however, so I may need to make more, but I may need to make many more anyway if they all blow up in the first firing.

Anyway, here is what one looks like. I stuffed it with newspaper, wrapped it in banana peels, tied them on with salt-soaked string, and poked the rose hips in for effect. I have no idea if any of those things will show up at all. We can but wait and see.

Here is batch one:

And batch two:

You will notice that some of them are not stuffed with newspaper, and that is because I forgot that I was going to do that until I'd already wrapped them up so that I could no longer fit the paper in. The purpose of the paper is twofold (HA, fold): it will smoke the insides completely black (at least it's supposed to) and also hopefully provide some support so they don't collapse in on themselves. I think the biggest worry is not the imploding but rather the large burning logs of wood falling and crushing them, but I'll just load them really carefully. Bisque ware is pretty resilient; I don't advise dropping it from a height, but the logs I'm using I think are small enough to not do too much damage. Although the heat of the fire may change that, I don't know. Wait and see is the name of the game at this point.

I also took some newsprint-ish paper that I had lying around and made little packets of salt, table and epsom, that I am going to put around the pieces in the pit, which will hopefully make pleasant flashes on the pieces. But as I say, I don't know. They could all turn out completely black. But that would be an outcome, and I would go with it.

Surveying

Honestly this didn't take very long because my back yard isn't very big and I knew kind of what I wanted, but I will show you here anyway. Here is the view from my back door. Obviously this is not the place to dig a pit as it is full of dogs and tables and chairs and crocuses and things and also it is where people walk and it would be a great pity if my WISE project resulted in any broken necks or other limbs. 

So here instead is what you might call the side yard. It is much less well-kept, not that the back yard is at all well kept, but you take my point. See the two trees, one immediately adjacent to the right corner of the dog pen and the other partially obscuring the fence and white propane tank? The pit is going between them.

See also, below, that there is a path which dogs and gardening family members traverse, which I have been forbidden to make a mess of? Strain your eyes and also see that I have set up a few rocks in approximately the most optimal spot. It just looks like a gray blob, left center of the photo, right of the path. That's where the pit will be dug. My father avows that there are no fuel lines or electric lines or pipes or anything there. The biggest concern, for the diggers, is tree roots. I've tried to place it away from the visible ones at least. We may need to adjust by a few inches, but there, as I say, is the general area in which we are digging the pit.

Mentor Meeting/Progress 4/25

A short entry with no pictures and words of few syllables.

Today Jocelyn and I were in the same room, which maybe constituted a meeting. She put the bisque kiln in to fire today and it should be out tomorrow, so I'll have four more pieces, I think, assuming none of them broke.

I also burnished five pieces and trimmed three today. Those three will get burnished probably on Wednesday.

I will go to Cayuga Lumber tomorrow or Wednesday.

We are digging the pit on Friday and hopefully the first firing will also take place that evening. It is damned hard to get all the people I want in one place though so we'll see how much actual work gets done.

Soon I shall show you what I did over break, which is thrilling.

Jenny

Oh man, I love Jenny Lee. I also love her photography. I will be straight, I worry when people want to do photography, in general; I think it is extraordinarily difficult to be original or artistic with it, because anybody can take black-and-white pictures of a lawn chair, as the Internet says. But nothing could be further from what we have going on here. Observe, I beg of you.

The above image belongs to Jenny and is hers and I do not own it or have any connection with it in any way except as an awed admirer. 

This is completely relevant since we are partners and also classmates and must view each other's work and I confess I am terrible at reading other people's blogs, even those who read mine (sorry, Paul) but this was on Facebook and hit me like a ton of bricks, I love the light, the composition, the everything. I think it is magnificent and I am honored to be collaborating with its author.

Giving

So, I submitted the building use form for the show today; right now it looks like it's going to be Sunday, June 5, from 3-5 PM. I don't want to have it on Friday because that would coincide with the Ithaca Festival Parade and opening, which I don't particularly want to attend, but I expect our potential patrons will. I'd rather have had the show the next weekend, but the space was unavailable.

Now that we have a venue, the show starts to seem a lot more real, and I am considering the possibility that some people may attend who would like to actually pay real, minted U.S. dollars for our work, and much as I would like to spend those dollars on Christian Loubotin shoes or, failing that, my college education, I have decided to forward all the aforementioned proceeds to the Japanese relief effort. But I need a way to do this, as donating to charity is not actually as easy as you might think it should be.

So, I have thoroughly explored two websites designed for the express purpose of helping you decide where and how to philanthropize with 'em, dude (anyone? anyone? ...no...okay) : www.charitynavigator.org/ and www.bbb.org/charity-reviews. I am inclined to trust the BBC because hell, it's the BBC - and the other one looks reputable too. After carefully traversing the above sites, I have selected:

Why I approve: It's been going since 1948, and 98% of its total funds go to its programs, leaving 2% for marketing and fundraising expenses, which is perhaps why it's not as widely known as, say, the American Red Cross. Why I didn't pick the Red Cross: Only 90% of its total funds go to its actual relief programs, and most of the rest goes to marketing. Furthermore, the ARC doesn't promise to give all the money you send directly to the Japanese relief effort (part of your gift may go to marketing or relief in other places), while DRI sends every penny straight to Japan, if you specify that's what you want. 

Also, this is from the mission statement: "DRI’s medical assistance programs help to equip health professionals working in resource-poor communities to meet the challenges of diagnosing, treating, and caring for people without regard to politics, religion, gender, race, or ability to pay." I like this very well; the American Red Cross is, after all, a cross, and I fear it may exhibit some of the same bigotry in its operations as the Salvation Army, for example. DRI goes out of its way to be unbiased. And it's mainly providing medical relief, which may be more crucial than anybody has foreseen, if the disaster at Fukushima continues to escalate. 

Hunting and gathering

This weekend I got a bunch of stuff together for wrapping my pieces prior to firing. I think I shall call it "dressing" them.

1. I put a lot, a lot, a lot of salt (NaCl) in tap water, dissolved it, and added 100% cotton string. This will be wrapped around the pieces, helping to secure the extras or just making cool lines. 

I did the NaCl thing twice and then put baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3) in the plastic tub and added some string to that as well. And I went digging around my house's craft closet and found copper wire. All of these things are supposed to have wonderful effects on the pieces during firing. 

Banana peels. Every time anyone eats a banana in my house I watch them like a hawk and then snatch the peel away and take it to my stash. I am going to use these for the potassium, which apparently turns green when it volatilizes.

And I gathered a whole bunch of straw (last year's daylily stalks, really) and twigs for kindling, and put them in my shed so the thunderstorms wouldn't get them, but the thunderstorms have so far failed to appear at all, so I don't know.

Finally, I was out in my yard and looking around for interesting natural things that could look nice, and I though of my millions of wild rosebushes, so I went and collected the rose hips (below) and am going to bind them to the pieces with my salt-soaked string. 

I endured massive thorns to get the rose hips but I think it was worth it.

I'm also going to try epsom salt. Sometime in the next week I'll be making newspaper packets of table salt, epsom salt, and baking soda, and placing them around the pieces so they make flashing effects as they volatilize. I hope to dress all my pieces over break and dig the pit the weekend after and fire all through the month of May.

Art show? For real?

We are having a show, officially. By which I mean that it is official that we, Jenny and myself, are having a show in which we show our art to actual living breathing people.

I made a poster because I am a boss not only at pottery but also at making posters. But I can't show it to you because blogger is not sufficiently sophisticated. It has the words "hope & healing/for Japan" superimposed on the red sun of the Japanese flag (because my theme is Hatching Hope, and Jenny's has something to do with healing I believe), and then in the lower corner

presented by Jennifer Yun-Mi Lee and Avalon Hayes Bunge

an exhibition of ceramic art and photography 
proceeds to benefit Sendai earthquake relief effort 

Ithaca High School’s Kulp Auditorium
Friday, 3 June 2011, 5-8 PM

because that's when it is. I emailed Adam Zonder, Lord of Kulp, and asked for a weekend date in the first two weeks in June, and he said the 3rd or the 5th, and we chose the 3rd because it will line up nicely with gallery night downtown. It's free, which is beautiful, and you can get tables and all, and the only tiny hitch is that a person certified in AED usage must be in attendance. Jenny and I are BOTH certified in first aid and CPR but neither of us have AED, which is bothersome, and John (who is a lifeguard) can't go. So we've got to figure that out.

But - we have a venue and a date! Rejoice!

Mentor Meeting 4/11

Today was what I like to call a Wildly Productive Monday. I made seven pieces:

 

and had four more come out of the bisque kiln:

 You may notice that some of the new pieces are ridiculously tiny, like less than 2" in height. This is because I have decided to scratch the two other series and stick to "Hatching Hope." More is just overkill. I still have those flowerpots but I am going to keep them myself, and plant flowers in them, dammit. But now that I'm just doing the one series I have a responsibility to it to make it really diverse, and of excellent quality, so I'm making some tiny eggs. Kind of like bird eggs as opposed to dragon eggs. Non-mythical birds, I mean. Not that there weren't mythical birds who laid tiny eggs. But I digress.

I met with Jocelyn, in a way; nothing much was accomplished but she did hunt this up for me:

It is a respirator, and I am going to use it so as not to poison myself when I mix up some iron oxide wash to spray in interesting blotches on the pots to add some more color, because I'm worried about not having enough. The recipe is approximately 1 tsp powdered FeO to 8 fl. oz. H20. That's from the wonderful Bible of a book Alternative Kilns and Firing Techniques, by Watkins & Wandless, which I shall cite elsewhere. I should be making the solution tomorrow or Wednesday.

Class Meeting 4/11: Lists

We are making lists. Before I make lists can I just say that Jenny Lee is the sweetest and best person ever and I am absolutely chuffed to be collaborating with her on our project. More on that in entries to follow.

Now, a list.

7 things I want to accomplish in the next week:
-Call or show up in physical incarnation at Cayuga Lumber and beg for sawdust and scraps
-Post entry about all the materials-gathering I have done in the past week or so.
-Post entry about the mentor meeting I am planning to have today
-Survey my land for the right place to dig my pit
-Dig my pit (This is very iffy but I'll put it on here anyway)
-Make 10 or so more egg pieces for the Hatching Hope series (I may need to stick to two series and discard the lanterns idea, nice though it was, because I am, shall we say, pressed for time at the moment).
-Begin preparing my pieces for their baptism by fire (This will become clearer when I show you what I have in the way of materials for firing)

Progress

Made flowerpots.

They look like flowerpots and everything.

And they have holes in the bottom.

That's all.

Yet more advances in Art

I continue to develop my creative soul. I have veered far, far away from the Greek ceramics angle, or the Asian ceramics angle (though Ms. Gergely is not abreast), and toward the Avalon ceramics angle, which is as follows. (See Coda, below.)

I am making three series of pieces for the art show. The first one comprises the eggs which have already been described in detail in the annals of this blog. As the show will revive around raising funds for Japan post-earthquake, I am going to call that series Hatching Hope. Thus far, the Hatching series is composed of fourteen eggs of varying sizes. I am going to leave it at that for the moment because I have yet to make the other series.

The second series will be called Planting Hope, and will consist of flower pots in traditional shapes. These should go faster because I do not intend to burnish them. I hope to end up with at least ten good-sized (final height >8 in.) pots. I may need to make more than that if some break.

The third series is to be called Illuminating Hope and will be made up of ~10 small (<5 in. ht) lanterns. I have made a lantern in my previous Artistic career and it is bitchin', and it also took me about a week to complete, so the lanterns in the Illumination series are going to be much smaller and much less complex. I will take the wrong end of a pencil, and a miniature star cookie cutter (or maybe something else), and make aesthetically pleasing cutouts in the wall of a small piece, approximately the shape of my eggs from the Hatching Hope series. Note that this third series is entirely conceptual at the moment and I do not know if I shall have time to make it at all, but I would like to. Three is such a nice round number.

Coda: I like original stuff, you know? I mean, the Greeks did what they did, and did it well, but they did it a damn long time ago, and there is certainly wisdom to be gleaned from it, but wouldn't you rather see new, never-before-seen-or-thought-of, pulled-from-the-virgin-shores-of-my-imagination Art?

Mentor Meeting 4/5

Today the situation has improved. I am now a mere 2.6 light-years from the phone, but it is still a long way to shout.

Look it up.

Anyway, today I met with Jocelyn, if you can call it that - her room is the ceramics studio, so i have to go there anyway, and we talk no matter what day it is, I guess a little more in-depth on meeting days, but not by much. I just keep going along and going along, you know.

I tried to find copper carbonate in the chemicals cabinet (about which I have been reading, it is good for introducing rich red colors in the pit) but the best I could do was iron oxide, so if I want copper carbonate I may have to order it, or I can see about using the iron oxide instead (need research there), or I can scratch the whole thing and do salt and soda, which I intend to use anyway.

More advances in Art: I am also going to get a bunch of leaves and soak them in salt water so they approximate seaweed, and wrap some of the pots in them. This may also help reduce hazardous emissions, because salt as everyone knows is NaCl, and dissociates at high temperatures,  and the sodium forms a sort of glaze and the chlorine is emitted as hydrochloric acid in gas form, how unpleasant. I don't think my kiln will get hot enough for this to be a real problem but I'm going to do the fake-seaweed thing anyway. And I'm going to do a baking soda wash before firing. Although evidently if you heat baking soda in the microwave it actually liquefies and you can just paint it on there, but I don't have a microwave. (I know, right?) I'll think about doing it in a saucepan but I think the soda and water mixture would work just as well.

Also today I burnished three pieces and after a considerable amount of trial and error I have hit upon the perfect method for doing so: Burnish perfectly vertically with spoon, turn 90 degrees and burnish in circles around the circumference with the spoon, then put your hand in a plastic bag, dip it in vegetable oil, and buff. Shiny. (That is an extremely clever pun, as anyone who has seen Firefly will know. I am on a science fiction jag today. If you haven't figured it out, my cryptic opening sentence is Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.)

Jocelyn wishes me to make a really big piece, which I am capable of doing, but I am afraid it might crack in the kiln. Her solution is to stuff the piece with newspaper prior to firing so it won't collapse in on itself. I like this idea so much I think I shall apply it to all my pieces, even the wee ones. Plus the newspaper will combust and smoke the inside of the pieces black, which I like, hoping it will contrast with the more colorful outsides. 

Class Meeting 4/4

When it was still December (*shudder*) and we were planning this semester, we all thought it would be a really good idea to have class Monday mornings. We thought we were being so clever and proactive and responsible and getting it out of the way. And let me tell you we were just dead wrong. Monday morning classes are awful.

It may astound you to learn that I am, in fact, a morning person. I love mornings. Why? Because they are quiet. Nothing pleases more than to wake up at five or six AM and witness the birth of a new day, and exist without anybody else around, simply being in that stillness, that silence. What I do not love, ever, in any circumstance, but particularly not on a Monday morning, is perky people in general. If you are one, fine. I am sure you have a wide circle of perky friends with whom you do perky things like shop for baby clothes and buy fair-trade teas and go to book clubs. But if perky is involved you can count me out. And that is what we get on Monday mornings in WISE. Perky, perky, perky. Works for some and not for others and I am decidedly other.

I have stronger words which I would like to use but I am still laboring under the delusion that it is possible for me to get a halfway decent grade in this class so I will refrain.

The reason I am indulging in such a cavalcade of self-pity is because I brought in one of my pieces to Show and Tell and was met with blank stares. I poured blood, sweat, tears and life force into the damn thing. And...nothing. There was that awkward beat, you know, when everybody knows they're supposed to ask questions but can't think of any, and then Ms. Gergely obviously figured she had to save the moment because it's her job, and asked something about Greek ceramics. And I haven't had anything to do with Greek ceramics since December or so. (As anybody who reads my blog, even in the most cursory fashion, would know.) So I said "uh." She seemed satisfied with that and moved on hastily to the interesting people.

Our "assignment" (I am just going crazy with the quotation marks today) for this week is to ponder how writing a blog instead of a paper journal is affecting our project. I like it very well. I type a great deal faster than I write, so it's easier - I can write more, faster. And I can have pictures, without which this journal or whatever it is would simply suck. Plus it's kinder to the environment to not use paper. And I think it's just easier to take a person seriously in type than in handwriting. Not that anybody is reading this, so it really doesn't matter if I get taken seriously or not.

Please excuse my beyond-the-pale bitchiness today. Please realize that this is the third or so draft of this entry and by far the tamest, and contains the fewest swear words. Please attribute my abrasive qualities to the fact that I am an Artist, with all the liberties of personality that come with that position. If you are still not convinced not to despise me, put this all down to the fact that I have so far failed to acquire All Eternals Deck at three separate music emporia, and it came out MARCH 29, and without it I do not think I can be a productive human for very much longer. (I know - what was all that I was saying about not dragging in personal drama? But this is not personal, it is Artistic. I desperately need the thing for my Art. I think I shall capitalize all words containing the root word Art from now on.)

Inspiration

At the start of this blog I swore to never discuss any personal drama, and to that I hold, but I think it is high time I posted an entry regarding what exactly makes me tick, because some people think I tick kind of strangely, maybe even have a whole different ticking mechanism on a whole different frequency from normal people, and I can't swear to any of that but here, in brief, is why I am who I am, and why my WISE project is so perfect for me, and why I chose it, and all of that.

(The following is not what I originally intended to write about but it is important.)

 I think respect is the highest compliment one person can pay to another, and the person whom I respect most in the world is a man named John Darnielle. He is a musician but he is also a poet and an artist and a human being with a totally other kind of energy which acts like a magnet toward me and my other-frequency ticking mechanism.

I would like to post some of his lyrics to show you why my heart is so filled with love for this man but I do not think that they can achieve their full effect without that beautiful desperate energy which he possesses in intoxicating, addictive quantities. If you would like to scratch the surface of beginning to understand - I don't know how to help you. You may YouTube "This Year" but you will get live versions with shit audio. To spare you the trouble, it goes, in part:

I am gonna make it through this year 

if it kills me

I am gonna make it through this year 

if it kills me

And I need that assurance, I need it badly, and somehow the only way I can believe it is if it comes from him. It comes through in every single one of his several hundred songs, even the ones which don't spell it out like that, even the ones which are in fact saying exactly the opposite. And the reason why this is relevant is that I probably would have dropped out of school some years ago if it were not for this magnificent person, and so it is really down to John that I am in WISE at all. So.

Now I can say what I intended to say when I first conceived this entry.

I live here:

I mean, I live in a house, but if you look out my window, as I frequently do, you see the above. If you walk a hundred paces up a hill, you get to the below: 

And if you walk along that an unspecified number of paces, you come to this: 

Not just that ^ , actually, but a whole multitude of little secret waterfalls and streams and gorges and cliffs and what I am trying to say is that when I was bored as a child I went out in the woods and played by myself, as I do not have any siblings or cousins and live miles from civilization, and as a result of that strange wood-child isolation really from a very young age I have seen things in a very different light from most people whom I know. Or at least I try to. The ability is leaving me as I get older and have more contact with humans who live in the real world and I don't like that at all. Not the humans nor the real world nor the fading of my vision.

Water ^. 

Where I have grown up there is water and earth and in this project I am taking the earth and purging the water and submitting the finished project to a baptism by fire and air, joining all the elements in my process and most importantly creating, defying entropy, transitioning from the randomness of wet clay to the fractal-like order of a well-thrown vessel. And then so that I don't become too linear I introduce the element of the kiln, the fire in the earth, where anything can happen. I put something in and I get the same skeleton out but really it isn't me who has modified it, but the substances which the earth has given to me which I am only very gently manipulating.

Talking of fractals: Trees.

And stones. I don't have a picture for you, but the waterfall just beside my house looks like a staircase, as though somebody had carved it. Nobody did, it just exists like that. It is proof that nature can give you order out of chaos, and you can also, conversely, give order back to nature and it will introduce an element of chaos, so that nothing is weighted, everything is balanced. In my pieces I desire a balance between the uniformity of the round vessel and the skin of it, the colors, which I cannot predict, which just occur according the the position of such variables as sunlight, temperature, quantity of salt, quantity of soda, length of burning, amount of wood, type of wood, dryness of wood - they are infinite.

The following pictures are examples of the vision I have acquired from the woods. Every few steps on the path there is a gift of beauty, something out of the ordinary, given from no one to no one, just there.

I know that the patterns or colors on my pieces will be irregular and random and I want them so, I want that contrast with the symmetry of the vessels themselves. As you can see, things do not have to be uniform to be beautiful.

Sometimes the unexpected is what pleases the eye.

Sometimes we see patterns or pictures that aren't there, or maybe they are there. Maybe they are meant to be and maybe they just happened.

Maybe the uncertainty over which is true is the better part of beauty.

Maybe I should go to bed.