On the way to Chicago for this, I was invited to do a mini three hour workshop at Harper College in Palatine. I was astounded by the size and equipment of the studio.

Upon my return from that, it was a mad race to finish a lot of work for a round of shows. I have been thinking lately that it I have been taking on too many projects, but the opportunities that have come my way were too good to pass up. At times it felt like I was on the verge of burning out. I was putting in long hours whether or not I felt like making work on a particular day. Pots crowded all flat surfaces of the studio as I assembled as many as 25 pieces a day.

The most recent show to go up was my Solo Exhibition at Lillstreet Studios in Chicago. I delivered 57 pieces of varying colors, shapes, and sizes. I was not able to make the opening, but that just happened on Saturday.

Today I find myself at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena Montana as a summer resident. I am beginning to install a grouping of work for our Resident Artist Exhibition, which opens on Thursday.

More on the Archie Bray Foundation soon!

“As much as things change, they stay the same” couldn’t have been said better by my former teacher and now friend Randy Becker. A tour of my first studio last weekend brought back a rush of memories as the room itself remains uncannily familiar, essentially unchanged in the 12 years since I left. I am just returning from a trip up to Wisconsin to set up a solo exhibition at my old high school and thought I would share some images and a little bit of a background story about my initiation into the ceramic world.

I think I would have become a ceramic artist eventually, regardless of what my experiences were, as I have always been fascinated with clay. One of the first sentences I wrote back in first grade said “When I grow up I want to be a sculptor”. It was just my luck, however, that the public high school I attended had one of the best equipped and most successful high school ceramic art programs I’ve ever seen or heard of. This was at Verona Area High School, just outside Madison Wisconsin. Through some luck and a lot of hard work, determination, and community engagement, Becker was able to build this program over the years into what it is now – a rare and wonderful place for students, whether they want to become artists or not, to enjoy a creative endeavor. To take a break from the rest of it and solve some problems in a different way. Let’s take a tour shall we?

The main studio space has pretty much all the things a studio needs – 10 wheels, stacks of bats, buckets, slab roller/extruder, wedging tables, shelves, and work tables. Classes are split, with half working on tables, and half on wheels. Halfway through the semester the groups swap. I tried doing this with a class at IUS, and now have a much greater appreciation for what this requires of a teacher. One thing I remember quite well about my time in this studio was the visiting artists that came in and gave workshops. During my time there, I can remember such artists as David Dahlquist, Peter Hayes, Winthrop Byers, Bruce Breckenridge, and even Don Reitz coming by to give workshops. I never quite realized how amazing that was until I learned who all those people were later on in my education.

The glazing and firing situation at the studio was fantastic. Becker is an avid researcher of glazes, and accordingly equips the studio with a huge variety and quantity of glazes for cone 10 reduction AND oxidation. Some glazes work in both for different effects, and others work only in one or the other. I remember towards the end of my time there getting special permission to test my own glazes, and even got to mix up a bucket of my own.

In addition to these kilns pictured, students were invited and encouraged to participate in wood, salt, raku, and wood/salt firings at various studios in the area, including Randy’s own kilns. I remember a few incredible experiences hanging out stoking kilns with a bunch of local artists. A lot of my best work from high school came out of those firings.

If I didn’t keep myself busy making work, I would get sent to the mixing room to knock out a batch of clay. We were on the all-you-can-eat clay policy, which meant that the 100 plus students that used the room every day went through a couple batches, every day. I remember feeling sorry for the student teacher who seemed to be constantly running that thing.

In addition to the studio, the school has an art gallery. Local, national, and international artists show work throughout the semester. Collectors Colleen and Dennis Bindley would show part of their collection once per year. Once, Dennis came in to give a talk about the collection. He passed around a pot for us to handle. When it returned to his hands he told us that is was a Hans Coper piece worth about $60,000 at the time. He then told us the legendary story of Coper and Lucie Rie. That experience is seared into my mind now, never to be forgotten.

At the present moment, my own show is up in that gallery. Being a homecoming experience, I decided to make the show partially retrospective. The center of the gallery shows my current body of work while the perimeter houses work made while I was in high school, with a few pieces from various stages of my development through undergraduate and graduate school to bridge the gap.

This pitcher and cup set, a prized possession of my parents, was made during my senior year of high school. It was fired in Becker’s wood/salt kiln on his friend Don Hunt’s land. I went out there with a couple friends and hung out stoking the kiln with a some locaI artists and UW Madison students. It came out quite nice, so Becker shot a slide of it and entered it into a show – the First Annual K-12 Exhibition at NCECA, in Dallas. Don Reitz, the juror for that show, awarded it with the best of show, pretty much finalizing my choice to become a ceramic artist as a career. My friend Shannon Sullivan, who graduated with me, was also awarded an honorable mention. She is now an accomplished ceramic artist and tenured professor at the College of the Redwoods in California. We are just two of the dozens of professional artists, teachers and graduate students to come out of this program.

One thing I really love about Becker is that he says we were the easy ones. His real work is with the students he knows wouldn’t come to school at all if not for the ceramics class. He reminded me over lunch that teaching is a lot more than just sharing skills. A good teacher will help others become better people, and maybe on the side the students will learn something about clay. Even today, he is still my teacher.

I conceived of and built this tile bat system nearly 10 years ago while an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. At the time, I had a few major problems to solve, and as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I needed bats, and lots of them. The studio at UWW did not provide bats, you had to get your own. I had a few plasti-bats and a few other assorted brands and materials. I didn’t really like any of them. The Plasti-bats would jiggle on the pins, slowly growing the holes and making elliptical pots – unacceptable. The Creative Industries injection molded ones were better, but had deeply grooved undersides that would latch on to any sort of studio debris, and as a porcelaineophile working in a mixed-clay studio, that didn’t work so well. Little chunks of stoneware kept finding their way into my clay via the undersides of these bats. I had a couple masonite bats. I shouldn’t even have to explain why those weren’t working. The particle board bat I had develped a lump of waterlogged swollen fragile wood right in the middle. I did not want to pour plaster bats, as they would be very hard to keep from wrecking my and everyone else’s work from the inevitable lime pops associated with plaster dust finding it’s way into the clay. So anyway, from all these bats I had purchased, I knew what I DIDN’T like. Then I started thinking about what I wanted out of my bats.

Having limited space, as all students do, I wanted maximum shelf utilization. How often to we really need the full 13 inches of diameter? I wanted a material that would not have the possibility of warping or flexing. Even way back then, I had already lost many pots to the bat flexing as it was removed from the wheelhead and thereby warping the pot on top of it. I wanted to be able to have more bats than I would ever need to use, so that I would never be forced to stop working early or be tempted to flip a pot too early just so I could keep making work. I also was quite poor, so couldn’t afford to shell out a few hundred bucks to make that happen with 10 dollar bats. I finally decided to throw on tiles, which have all the things I want, and none of the problems I had experienced with other bats. I used a couple of my old plasti-bats to make the holder.

I started by purchasing the tiles. I simply drove to the Menard’s store in Janesville to see what was on hand. I found VersaTile 8 inch unglazed quarry tile. These are the kind of tiles you would do a patio in, not a kitchen, as they have a textured and porous surface, not the easiest thing to clean. For my purposes, however, they were perfect. The texture helps the clay grab on. The porosity sucks the clay on, and even promotes even drying through absorption while the pot is still attached, although not as effectively as plaster. At the time, they were a mere $.50 each. I purchased 30 of them to start, all for the price of one or maybe two other bats.

Then I had to figure out how to mount the tiles on the wheel and keep them centered.

I noticed that the thickness of one tile was almost exactly that of two plasti-bats, so I went ahead and epoxied the two plasti-bats together, planning to cut a tile-sized hole in them to accept the tiles. I put the new 2-ply bat on the wheel and then centered a tile on top of that. Once it was perfectly alligned, I carefully traced it with a scribe, and cut out the middle with a jigsaw. I cut the hole slightly too small and then filed and sanded it to fit perfectly. I then cut a notch into it so that I could use a screwdriver to pry the tiles up to get them off the wheel.

I use these tiles to throw pretty much everything except plates and platters. For those I use my stockpile of Creative Industries plastic bats. Even my largest bowls have a footprint smaller than 8 inches across, so this works perfectly even for those.

When throwing, I use 4 small chunks of soft clay to level the tile with the bats. I place them in the corners and then smack them down. I do this once per session. The clay will hold until it becomes either bone dry or waterlogged.

In the decade since I made this system, I have had no problems. The tiles are now perhaps a bit jiggly, but I’ve learned to apply the right kind of pressure while throwing so that they do not wiggle any more. I have only broken a few of the tiles over the years, and have been able to buy replacements at Lowe’s and Home Depots in Indiana and Kentucky as needed. It has proven to be a worthwhile investment of one afternoon, a long, long, time ago.

Questions/comments?

I have been trying to really refine my teapot form lately. It is a very nice challenge to work around. For me, even though it is unlikely anyone would have the courage to actually use it, it must perform exceptionally well. I use the requirements of physics to direct my choices. The venturi effect spout shape, a 45 degree angle for drip prevention, a spout tip slightly higher than the interior lip of the body, a handle pulled in close to the body, and a handle-based lid latch are all part of the design.

I begin with a leather hard body, which I proceed to dissect in a swooping, graceful pattern.

In this new style, I’m going for a cut pattern similar to leaves, both as bunches and as singular detailed forms at the same time, ambiguously bouncing between the two. From the chaos, I make order.

Now, to alter the spout. I split it and then stick it back together.

I make a built in tea filter, which I drill by hand using a drill bit. I just eyeball it. After the holes are made, I rotate the back end of the drill bit to widen and compress the holes.

I attach the spout, lining up the split with the line on the teapot form.

Next, the lid gets it’s knob put in.

Finally, a handle is added, here’s the final form.

Thanks for checking this out. Your comments and questions are welcome.

During week three, I took a much needed vacation up to Wisconsin to reset my brain before the school year kicked in. Todd and Reese powered on for another gruesome week of hard labor in high heat. The flash flood that occurred on campus turned our whole inside studio into a biohazard, as sewage backed up a full two inches deep throughout the building! As I write this about 2 months after the event, the building is still not quite back to normal yet.

After the arch was finished, we built the chimney. With several corbels, it was tricky, but went quickly nonetheless. After that, we made the insulative coating, made of two inches of kaowool and a 1000 pounds of hand mixed combination of 1 part portland cement, 1 part fireclay, 3 parts sand. this took much longer, was much messier, and harder than we had anticipated. In the places where we did not hustle enough, there are now cracks that have formed. The fence material used as rebar ended up wanting to poke through in places. It was a clumsy process I’d rather not experience again.

After the coating went on and set, Todd and Reese finished the chimney. A long and arduous process of lifting hundreds of bricks up a ladder to the roof began, and after a few days, they got the chimney complete. Once that was done, the whole kiln got reinforced with steel angle iron. Here’s a few pics of what the finished kiln looks like from a few angles.

Questions/comments?

The day after I posted last time, we built the entire arch and cast the giant keystone all in a single long day. The form was put perfectly in place and the bricks were carefully laid. First, we stacked what we thought would work. We used combination of “straights” or regular firebricks, “#1 arches” or bricks that are tapered slightly on one side, and #2 arches” bricks with a more sever taper and thinner profile. The combination is methodically tweaked to find the perfect order of bricks, leaving no open slits on the inside or outside. As we worked, we found that the height of the high-temp mortar between the bricks altered the order and types of bricks needed to properly build the arch.

Something specific to the Manabigama design, the arch is not quite a parabolic arch, it is an arch that is slightly flattened at the top to accommodate the stacking space needs inside the kiln. Regular catenary or parabolic arches distribute the weight of the bricks naturally to a near-vertical slope. This allows them to stand and support weight without any external support structure. We are a little apprehensive of this alteration, and had discussed that if we did it over, we might consider altering the plans to a sprung arch of approximately the same dimensions, as it would improve the stacking space and also be a lot easier to build, while allowing us to hang a swinging door easily to the front, rather than a door that must be re-stacked every time we fire. It would not have that iconic Manabigama look to it though, something like a prairie schooner or a classic red hip-roofed barn, a very American image.

As we stacked the walls, we were very careful to keep each course of bricks level, and tightly stacked against the form. Every once in a while, I would try to “look into the future” by stacking a combination of bricks to get the arch figured out. I was amazed by how many variations we went through strictly based on the mortar height issue. As we approached the top, we discovered that my side was slightly off plumb, and so Todd put his wood floor polishing experience to use and used the angle grinder to correct the shape. FYI, a masonry disc just eats through firebrick, good to know.

Once the walls were built up to their last course, we cut a couple end caps and put down some plastic. The arch form, bricks, and end caps form a mold for the keystone. The keystone is made out of a castable refractory material, basically a super-high temp concrete. Once cured, this keystone is what makes the arch work. Downward gravitational force is distributed outward and then downward through the shape of the arch.

Once the key has cured, the process of removing the form is done carefully and methodically. It must be dropped down slowly and then pulled out straight and level so it does not jostle or push into the arch at any point. We stacked some bricks and ran a plank, which was carefully leveled with shims, to slide the form out upon.

Stay tuned for the next segment, the completion of the kiln!

Comments/Questions?

I am currently on a hiatus from making work. That does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that I am not very busy. The current project is the construction of a new wood kiln at the University of Louisville, where I teach. After more than month of planning and some very in depth investigations, Todd Burns decided that for our program, the Manabigama design would be the best choice. I agreed.

The Manabigama is a new and highly popular kiln design, the brainchild of John Thies and Bill Van Gilder. These kilns are springing up all over the country for their practicality in the group studio, educational, and workshop settings. Basically a miniaturized and super-powered anagama kiln, the Manabigama apparently reaches target temperature with ease, has highly directional firing effects, and is small enough that a single person could make enough work to fill it regularly, and a class can do a single assignment and fire it as a group. It uses very little wood in woodkiln standards, about a cord per firing.

We began construction of our new kiln on Tuesday. We have gotten some help from a number of our students, as well as some local potters and students from a neighboring university, IU Southeast, and my friend Ryan Shortridge from Bloomington. We have been chugging along and making good – but meticulously careful – progress. Sore from head to toe only a few days into the build, I will not soon forget how much labor it takes to build one of these things.

So far, we have laid the cinder block to make the foundation the right shape for the kiln, then put in the firebox (where the wood will actually be burning), the floor of the kiln, and have constructed a form to build the arch around. Each of these things has taken twice the time we had planned. Both Todd and I are quite anal retentive with everything concerning craftsmanship, and hold firmly to the belief that things we make can only be perfect. As with making art, it takes however long it takes to do it right, no half-assing anything just to save time or energy.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this new kiln we are building is that it is right out the back door and will be totally covered by our kiln pad roof!

More updates to come…

The results of the first tweak, adding ball clay at the expense of EPK, were not noticeable. I then tried mixing a batch where the bentonite, instead of being added as a powder, was blunged. Blunging is adding the powder to hot water and then mixing it at high speed in a bucket with a drill mixer until it is a smooth gel. Once this is done, it is added to the mixer with the reclaim and then all the dry ingredients are added. The idea behind this process is that the bentonite, which is a very powerful plasticizer, needs to be activated. The tiny particles will do their job much better if they are nicely encapsulated in a thin film of water. Time will do this, when clay is aged for 6 months or so, the water is given time to evenly disperse between all of the particles, resulting in a slightly more workable product. I found that I could notice the difference in this change, so from then on, I resolved to add this extra step to the clay mixing process.

Still, the clay was having severe problems, especially in the pulling of handles. I have been resorting to drying out reclaim stashes for handle pulling. This is done by blunging the reclaim, or throwing scraps and rehydrated trimming and pots that cracked in the drying. I added a lot of water and mixed in a bucket until it was smooth. Then I would run the slip through a talisman sieve onto a plaster slab. This is left to dry until it becomes a nice workable consistency. It is wedged and stored in specially labeled bags, this stuff is precious! If I had the time and the setup, I would mix my clay this way. Blunged and dried clay is unbelievably superior to clay that is not. I hope to someday own a filter press, an industrial piece of equipment that does this process in minutes rather than days.

One remarkable discovery in this quest was Veegum T. This is a highly expensive, but highly effective additive. A member of the same mineral family as Bentonite, this material is fluffy and a pinkish cream color in it’s dry form, sort of reminds me of coffee non-dairy creamer powder. I blunged 2 pounds for my 200 pound batch in a bucket of hot water. The results were astounding. Although it still fell short of what I was hoping my clay could be, it was much, much better. There finally seems to be a little bit of suction, or clay particle attraction. The throwing process brought out a lot of gel-like surface slip, and handles are possible from this clay without specially preparing it.

Although I finally decided to move to a commercially prepared clay body, I feel that my recipe would be something to go back to if I find myself with access to a pugmill next time I move studios.

Questions/comments?

In my search for the ultimate cone 6 porcelain, I really lucked out when my buddy Jim Gottuso, AKA Sofia’s Dad, generously offered me some of his clay to try. Jim puts his pots through hell and back, just as I do. He does this in the form of a process he calls “water etching” also called “hydro-abrasion”. Basically, parts of the dry but unfired clay are protected with shellac, and then water and a sponge are used to wear away the clay, yielding a relief design.

This is not easy on the clay. Jim’s pots get soaked and then dried numerous times before they are completed, so I’m thinking that clay he’s using must be really forgiving.

This clay, Laguna #16, also called Miller #617, is a porcelain marketed for cone 6. On their website, Laguna describes it as “Grolleg Cone 6 porcelain similar to #15 with more ball clay, making it less white, more plastic and forgiving. Additional silica reduces crazing in some glazes. Good for slab forming.” Now, I have to hand it to them, Laguna really knows what is important to include in a description! Rather than something like “a dream to throw” there is some useful and honest information geared toward guiding the customer to the correct choice for their needs. Amazing.

This is one of those clays that needs to be “shocked”, or thrown down on the floor with force, before use. It felt very hard, but after I did that, it was the perfect consistency, soft and pliable but not at all sticky or slumpy. The consistency is very dense and very smooth. It is amazingly white in appearance. As white as Helios. Below is an image of a cup made of it, with my clay making up the disc. Bear in mind that my clay is also a porcelain, which fires much whiter than any of the clays already reviewed with the exception of helios, but only slightly less white.

I begin to throw a bowl. Compared to my very grainy clay body, this stuff feels incredibly smooth and wonderful. I am pleasantly surprised when my exact form of a bowl just realizes itself on the wheel. the clay goes where I put it and doesn’t move. There is perhaps a bit of the typical slump, but not anything that would jeopardize the roundness of the lip the way helios slumped. I already feel good about this clay. The bowl transfers off the wheel with no problems.

Again, with the tumbler, the form simply appears between my hands. There is no struggle to translate what I do with my normal clay into this clay. It happily goes where I want it. It collars back in with great enthusiasm. The tumbler went nicely thin, testing the lateral strength of the wall – it is strong. There is a nice balance between tooth and plasticity. I think I’m in love.

I will report on this more later, but of the 5 clays tried so far, all of the others were eliminated for glaze fit issues or just that they weren’t white enough for my glazes to look good. This is the only one that I have decided to finish the pots with. I was amazed to find that the properties during leather hard actually lend themselves to my process much better than my current clay! Not only will this be a sufficient substitute, but I have realistic hopes that it will make things possible that weren’t before. The next step will be to order 100 pounds and try out a kiln-full, and I can’t wait!

Questions/comments?

I am selling these in sets and singles through my Etsy store. There’s a couple already posted!

What do you think?