Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Unloading the doublewide

Robin hit the ground running just as soon as we arrived back in the State of Utah it seemed. Sunday morning he was up early and out the door, headed back to school to unload the double wide wood kiln that he had helped load a week earlier. They call it the double wide here at USU as a reference to a manufactured home, it's a train kiln and the chamber is long and wide in comparison to the little train adjacent to it here in the kiln compound. Here's a look at part of the stack. 

This was what they call a reduction cool firing, a specialty of USU it seems, a different way of firing a wood kiln. The pots are fired to a lower temperature over about 30 hours and then the kiln is brought down in temp slowly with continued stoking to keep the kiln in reduction (starved of oxygen). The basic idea of a reduction cool is to manipulate the iron in the clay or glazes.  The colour palette is subtle, and this particular firing there seemed to be lots of red and black. 
 
Robin has been working with an idea recently to try and direct flame through holes in saggars that he has built specifically to hold some of his forms. The work related to this idea turned out as he intended and are really quite beautiful. He cleaned them up that afternoon to use in his critique the next day. 

He was happy with the dialogue that this idea created in his crit and it looks as though he is going to continue with it and see where it takes him. 
 

3 comments:

kmfm said...

I feel like I have learned so much about pottery since I have started reading your blogs. I like Robin's new pieces.

www.anns blog said...

Hi Both
Pottery is so foreign to me but I am really interested in reading your blogs

Anonymous said...

very cool shots... i'm intrigued by the surface of the large piece on the far right in the first pic