This past weekend I set up over 100 pots to show at the 3rd annual Art Festival in Bayfront Park in Duluth, MN. My parents, a few of my aunts and uncles, and 4 good friends also joined me! Special thanks to everyone who helped make this a successful weekend.
I brought 100 pounds of clay and my pottery wheel for throwing demonstrations. 4 bricks, each 25 pounds of clay, were formed into about 300 shot glasses using my hump throwing process. Check out the photos below shot by my Aunt Dolly:
Also check out my store to see just a few that I have for sale online:
Coil building was one of the first pottery techniques I learned, but it’s not something I do everyday or even every month. I like to use coil building for HUGE pots that are too big to throw.
I generally throw the bottom of the pot as big as I can, usually with a 20-40 pound lump of clay. The image on the left shows a pot that was thrown from 25 lbs. of clay and about 12 inches high, before I coiled up another 12 inches.
It’s a lot easier to coil a narrow shape than a wide shape, as wider pots tend to get off-center and want to collapse. I add the coils on top of each other by pinching the new coil into the clay below. My thumb leaves an interesting pattern from this process, and I generally keep this texture as decorative banding lines in the large jars. The image on the bottom left shows the coils after they have been smoothed together. You can see how the smoothing process also begins to form the pot’s profile.
Compared to throwing a pot on the wheel in a matter of minutes, coil building is a much slower process. The profile of the pot forms over a matter of hours, as the 2-3 foot long coils are individually rolled out and successively added on top of each other. The pot below was made with extremely thick coils to form a planter.
I started with a 35lb. mound of clay for the bottom, thrown 1.75 inches thick. I left a hole in the middle for water drainage in the finished planter. Then, I rolled 2 inch thick coils and paid careful attention when smoothing them together. The finished planter used about 410 lbs. of clay and with the help of some Red Hot Chili Peppers on shuffle, this pot formed in just under 5 hours. About 100 lbs. of water will evaporate from the clay before the firing, hopefully over the course of 2-3 months to avoid drying cracks.
Another way I often build BIG pots is by throwing pottery shapes, like large bowls and cylinders, and stacking them on top of each other. These combination stacks grow a lot faster but I tend to make these pieces a bit smaller and reserve coil building for the huge pots.
My interest in something I like to call rustic pottery began in high school, after my first visit to the St. John’s Pottery. I was impressed by the idea of harvesting pottery materials directly from nature, but even more blown away by the colors and surfaces achieved by Richard Bresnahan and his apprentices. I bought the book Body of Clay, Soul of Fire and it sat across from my pottery wheel for the rest of my senior year. Richard’s pottery was glazed naturally by wood ashes and flame that floated through the 87 foot long kiln, painting the pottery over the course of a 10 day wood firing. He learned these techniques during his apprenticeship in Karatsu, Japan. I tried to replicate his glazes and surfaces in our small electric kiln at Xavier High School and this made for some bright colors, but I was thirsty for the juicy wood fired surfaces.
I finally got to experience the use of natural materials during my freshman and sophomore years at CSB/SJU, interning at JD Jorgenson Pottery. JD, a former apprentice at the St. John’s Pottery, taught me how to use natural clays in both pottery and kiln building. We built a 3 chamber wood-kiln over 30 feet long and fired thousands of pots in over a dozen firings. JD’s kiln produced a huge variety of wood-fired surfaces, so I busted out as many little cups as I could to put them in every nook and cranny of the kiln. Most pottery was loaded as just raw clay, and each firing taught me more about how flame and wood ashes paint the clay surface.
Even my advisor and ceramics professor, Sam Johnson, was interested in wood firing during his 4 years of my undergrad that he spent firing mostly in gas kilns. Sam built a wood kiln at the University of Minnesota Morris, which fired he his work in occasionally; however, his gas fired pottery (he called it his “whiteware”) was meant to be shown with his dark, wood fired surfaces. Sam’s process really motivated my interest in gas firing, and his critiques of my glazeware helped me find parallels with my wood fired work.
The wood fired surface continued to influence my pottery for the remainder of college and shows up in my current work. Even with glazed pottery that’s fired in an electric or gas kiln, I look for glazes with rustic colors, surface qualities, and variation that occurs during the firing. Copper Red glazes provide deep, intense color that reminded me of the bright colors and asymmetrical patterns that Richard achieves on his pottery. The Nuka glaze utilizes local wood ash as the main glaze ingredient, and the ashes make for juicy surfaces with rustic tones. I brush iron onto the glaze, which drips during the firing as gold and brown streaks as it reacts with the wood ashes at 2500 degrees F.
I’m still amazed how elemental pottery can be: water, clay, wood, and fire are used to make tableware for everyday use, and the earthen materials create a rustic, earthen aesthetic. Wood firing taught me to give up some control and let the process speak. The pottery you eat and drink from at the Local Blend is fired in a gas or electric kiln, but it’s influence by the wood fired process and surface.
