Thursday, October 29

New work and wood firing


Fired another piece in the Raku kiln this past week. No explosions or fire balls this time. It came out pretty nice. Loaded 5 sculptural pieces and about 24 functional pieces in Dante. Dante is Mud and Fire's massive noborigama style wood kiln. It has two chambers one is just for straight wood firing and the other for salt firing. Together the chambers easily hold about one thousand pieces and takes four straight days of firing! I am so excited. It was started today and I will be going to help stoke the fire Friday morning and earlier Sunday morning (2:00 am) through Sunday afternoon when it will be done firing. I will post pictures next weekend when the work is unloaded.


Larger sculptural piece from the raku firing.

Wood chamber three quarters full. My mugs are stacked rim to rim on the right and two of my larger sculptural pieces are stacked on top of each other on the shelf above the mugs.


Monday, October 12

First work at Marywood

Graduate school is in full swing and I am working at full steam. We had a really exciting Raku firing this past Friday. There was a huge fireball and one of my pieces exploded. I have been making these closed forms, the glaze covered the little hole, pressure built up and it exploded, big time. I still fired the largest chunk of it and it happened to turn out the best.

Halves ready and waiting to be joined together.

Pulling my piece out of the kiln red hot and dropping it in the can full of combustibles.