Wood Firing
The pots began to have gradations of surface, depth, and colour where the flame slipped off them on its way along the kiln. Stuff out of the wood began to stick to the pots in varying degrees of melt, giving rough, smooth, matt, shiny surfaces, often in quite small areas. The differential heat from upstream to downstream altered the shapes of some pots, moved others to stick against each other or make shadows on the pots' sides where they blocked the flame's flow. There began from this process of more than heat and atmosphere to be a suggestion away from pots toward fired clay, bits of earth, pieces and lumps going through the firing.Read the full story
Letting Go
The sun is low on the Yorkshire hilltop and streams in under the vast farm shed roof. There is surprising quiet as the precut bundles of slabwood from the local saw mill are separated into individual pieces and fed into the fireboxes at the front and at the midway point along the side of this reclining beast of a kiln. There is a regular cycle of charging the fire, watching the pyrometer drop while the kiln seems to gather itself up under the pressure of unburnt gases, then smoke followed by flame erupts from every opening and reaches into the sky from the 18foot chimney. The pyrometer climbs again but seems to resist reaching much beyond its previous high.Read the full article
which first appeared in Ceramic Review Vol 155, 1995
