Firing

After four years of wanting to participate in a community woodfiring at Clayworks I finally managed it this past weekend. Serendipitously I didn't get the last of my bisqueware glazed in time for the final cone ten gas kiln firing of the semester, but there was a community woodfire this weekend and Laura mentioned she had plenty of room in her shares if I was interested... so I figured what the heck, its now or never... I got my pots ready and signed up for my shifts. 1-4pm Saturday, and 3-8am Sunday... hoowee... bring it on.

Woodfiring is a rather all-consuming event for any given weekend. There's glazing the work, then wadding, the process of putting special little clay feet on all your pieces so they don't get glazed to the shelves, and then loading... The firing itself is almost a 24 hour process- at least for us at Clayworks. We sit just within the city limits in a residential neighborhood and therefore have to do the bulk of the heavy firing at night, when the plumes of smoke can't be seen. Done during the day, and the fire departments receives endless calls of alarm about billowing smoke in the village... not so good for a healthy fire department/ceramic organization relationship.) After firing, the kiln cools for a good 48 hours and then there is unloading. And sanding the shelves and cleaning up the kiln etc. For any of you who are experts on wood kilns... this is not a very technical account, but an excited first-timers experience of the process.

The brilliant and beautiful thing about the wood kiln is that it is the wood ash that creates the glaze- as I understand it. As the kiln gets up to ridiculously high temperatures the ash melts onto the pots, creating unpredictable, and magical surfaces- earthy, brown and golden, endless variations... The fire licks and curls around the pieces painting them as it goes. Woodkiln gurus who have a much deeper understaning of this process know how to manipulate the surfaces and placement of work within the kiln so that certain results are more likely, but it is still a partnership with the elements, which is simply never predictable. I used various glazes on the interiors of my bowls, leaving the exteriors blank for the fire to doits bidding.

I'm so excited to see what comes out I can hardly stand it! 

Some photos of this involved process:

Saturday afternoon: Gary and Adam patiently building the coals little by little...
The backside of the kiln- and long hours of growing the fire slowly...
The wood to be burned (and this isn't all of it)...
My second shift started at 3:00am- I joined in the stoking, working to get the wood chamber up to temperature...
The billowing smoke in the dead of night- which can't be detected by city folk and won't raise alarm....
Woodkiln manager/god Jim and Lenni stoking. One person quick pulls the plug, while the other shoves the wood through into the inferno. This done about every two minutes or so.
5am- Adam preparing the salt and soda for the salt chamber... (Our kiln has a wood chamber, and a second salt chamber. Salt and soda are added to that chamber right at the end of the firing to produce different sorts of effects on the work.)
Working on getting the salt chamber up to temperature-- cone 11-- at which point we stoked heavily before adding the salt/soda... Yoshi here, watching the fire and ordering the stoking whenever the flames died down enough to see pots through the chimney opening.
The LAST stoke in the salt chamber before closing up the kiln...
Once that was done, and everyone had thrown a final piece of wood into the fire we closed up the kiln-- mudding up the 'cone windows' with newspaper and slip. The kiln will smolder and simmer down over the next three days while we wait (im)patiently for the unloading on Wednesday.

With everything that is going right now; the maddness of my impending move, packing and selling this and that, wrapping everything up at work etc. the one thought that keeps going through my head and keeps me awake at night: I wonder how my pots turned out??