As some of you know, I’ve been absorbed by ceramics for the last couple of years, improving my nascent skills and learning ever more at the BKLYN CLAY studio in TriBeCa.
Along the way, in true to Diana form, I fell in love with one of the most labor intensive and expensive firing techniques, natch. Wood firing.
Wood firing takes time, lots, and resources. It demands clay bodies that can withstand very high temperatures, extra time to load the kiln because each piece must be elevated above the shelves with a wadding material to keep it from sticking when the fire melts the glazes, and then a firing that lasts, at least in this case, approximately 50 hours, during which the temperatures are constantly monitored and the fire constantly fed a variety of wood: dense hard woods like maple and oak that burn slowly, and quick hot burning woods like pine and fir that get the party started.
Why? All I can say is that the first time I held a wood fired mug, not knowing what it was, I was seduced by the texture of the surface… smooth, silky, satiny, and shiny, with areas of crackled glaze and residual ash baked in. The wood firing process produces effects that are unpredictable; the fire has its way with the surface of the clay, regardless of the controls and expertise in place. The push-pull of controlled chaos has a kind of romance and poetry in its tension.
All that in the service of a coffee mug, because at the end of the day I want my work to be functional, handled, used, enjoyed.
For the last few months I’ve been making pieces specifically for inclusion in a Train Kiln wood firing out of a studio in Canton, CT, Canton Clay Works. Below are the fruits of that labor, I hope you like them.
Here’s a paragraph from a piece I found by author Rosin Saez about wood firing. I love the idea that clay has agency: In Wôpanâak, the native tongue of the Wampanoag people in the northeastern United States, the word clay is an animate noun, meaning it’s an object that has agency. (This grammatical feature doesn’t exist in the English language, as author-historian Glenn Adamson notes in Material Intelligence.) Clay is as much of the natural world as we are and thus has its own life—certainly enough to impose a sort of will on what it becomes, never fully relinquishing to the potter complete artistic freedom.