Sign of the Black Cat: August 2013

It has been a long time since my last post. Mostly family events like christenings, weddings and visits have been taking up a lot of my (not work) time. When the regularity of my creative work gets broken up in this way, it often takes me a while to get back on track.

Added to the life stuff is the fact that some of the projects I have been working on this summer were always going to take a while. I knew I wouldn't have anything to show for weeks, so I've been deliberately keeping it all in the background until I was ready. My regular drawing and sketching has taken a backseat during this period. I haven't stopped completely, and will post some of my sketches in my next post.

In previous posts I have shown some of the raku work that I have done in the past. I like this kind of experimental, relatively low tech ceramics work very much. I will be doing more raku in the future, but having read around the subject I discovered other processes that were more accessible to me. Narrowing it down to the work I really like and that didn't involve very toxic chemicals, it was obvious that both pit and barrel firing would produce interesting work. Since my back yard is brick paved, pit firing was out of the question.

My boyfriend is very good at sourcing useful items that are in need of recycling, and managed to reclaim a couple of small steel barrels (closer to buckets really) that were destined for the skip at work. So through most of the summer I've been working at HIVE to produce some simple coil built bowls that I have then burnished, and had bisque fired. During this time, I've learnt a lot about burnishing, partly from experience but also from a couple of very useful books (Low-firing and Burnishing, and Alternative Kilns & Firing Techniques). My preferred method at the moment is to put a lot of thin layers of white slip on to my finished bowl, allow it to dry to nearly bone dry and then burnish with the back of a spoon first, then finishing with a thin plastic bag.

This weekend I had a couple of bisque fired bowls, and good enough weather to do a test firing. I was concentrating so much on what I was doing I forgot to photograph the process. Next time!

I followed the packing of the barrel from the Alternative Kilns section on barrel firing, with a layer of sawdust sprinkled with table salt, the bowls with copper wire tied around them, some dried seaweed packed around, covered with straw and some more table salt, then another layer of sawdust, and finishing with a stack of wood and kindling on top.

As my barrel is so much smaller than the ones usually used, the whole process only took a couple of hours. I was too impatient to let it all cool slowly, but I may do in the future. But the results were better than I was expecting for a first attempt.

I took a few pictures as I was taking the bowls out to let them cool down, so you can see my barrel. During the firing I had it set up on the bricks, but had taken it off them so that I could put the cooling bowls there.