 John Britt with SOME of the tiles he brought with him, showing the logic of what we were doing in the workshop. He had 40+ base glazes, and a sheet with 11 colorants that would get added to each glaze. Each person in the workshop made a different base glaze, made 11 different versions and applied each of those to tiles made from 3 different kinds of clay. There are thousands and thousands of glaze recipes online and in print. But John Britt’s books have such a well organized variety, I just don’t bother looking elsewhere. His YouTube free glaze class is amazing, when I came back to ceramics after many years, it not only removed the rust from what I could remember but gave me a more thorough understanding than I had before. I really didn’t want to do another workshop so soon after the Josh DeWeese one at Peters Valley, but it was John Britt close to home, how could I pass it up?  John Britt showing my notebook to the class! The notebook is where I keep track of glazes I'm developing, mostly from local materials. After making my own paint, I already had ground up rock when I started teaching ceramics, so it was a pretty natural segue for me to start formulating glazes. It’s true I also listened to lots of Phil Berneberg’s videos and read a bunch of good books, but John Britt is definitely my glaze hero. As much as I’ve learned on my own, I had never taken a class specifically in glazes. John was so systematic and organized in the way he structured the class that it helped me organize my own thinking about glaze development, and how I might present things to my more advanced students.  I was particularly interested in the tiles you see in the front; it's a "fake reduction" copper red. My first attempt at mixing this glaze came out gorgeous-but nothing like the copper red you see here. Hmm, I've got my homework cut out for me. The workshop was hosted by Kettle Creek Pottery, a really lovely pottery studio owned by Amy Manson. It was a great group of people. My moment if glory is when John asked me if he could show my notebook to the class! I got a photo of him holding up my notebook which I of course pasted into that notebook.
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 Me watching the noborigama Kiln at Peter's Valley When Peter’s Valley announced this year’s workshop schedule, I was at first perturbed that they had shifted the firing of their anagama (see dancing with the dragon) from August, before fall semester begins, to mid-October. Then I noticed they had scheduled Josh DeWeese to do a workshop firing the noborigama. Josh DeWeese was a long-time director of the famous Archie Bray Foundation, and is a stellar artist I wanted to work with, so I took the plunge and signed up.  Noborigama kiln, view from the chimney end at the top, looking down on the blowholes of both chambers. When the fire in the blowholes dies down, it's time to stoke with more wood. A noborigama is a multi-chambered wood-fired kiln, and the workshop was shorter than theanagama one so I went in to the workshop expecting a kind of “anagama light” workshop that was essentially loading the kiln and firing it for the whole time. I certainly didn’t expect the actual firing of the kiln to be only 24 hours (after pre-heat) or all the demonstrations. I was expecting that, like the anagama, the outside of the work would be dominated by wood ash deposits turned to glass (glaze) by the heat, and that I would only be applying glaze on the inside of the pots, with little or nothing on the outside. The workshop began with Josh showing us his more elaborate process of glazing, suited to a shorter wood-fire and soda kiln. In the noborigama at Peter’s valley, the first chamber is wood only, and the second chamber is a soda-fire chamber. The soda jacks up the color response and flow of glazes. Applying glaze for that atmosphere (soda) was totally new for me, and to be honest, I didn’t really take advantage of much of the flood of information Josh gave us, especially not on my Medieval inspired vases. There were some in the workshop who did a very good imitation of Josh’s style, and got great pots as a result. But as much as I love Josh’s work-I was thrilled to buy a fabulous pitcher that he used in his glaze demo-but I just couldn’t instantly figure out how what he demonstrated could be used on my Medieval inspired work. Luckily I brought a bunch of mugs that were plain enough in form that I didn’t mind getting more elaborate with the glazing.  Some of what came out of the kiln, including mugs where I experimented more with the glazes. I have to admit I did a pretty fast down-and-dirty glaze job on my pots, in part because as explained above, I knew I didn’t have the time to fully process how this glazing approach could work for the forms I brought to fire. The other reason was, I wanted to be right there for all the kiln-loading. Loading a wood kiln is a crucial part of the process, and one I’m keen to learn about since I actually get to do that at the NCC East 40 wood kiln. It was so exciting to see my work go into the kiln; it seems that catenary arch kilns just love my work. “I need something tall and skinny” is almost a cliché when loading a catenary arch kiln; my work loves snuggling up to the curved walls of the kiln. When they put in my Hypnos at the top of the arch, I had to snap a photo before all the rest of the work got packed in.  Red arrow pointing to an entire shelf of my work, snuggling into the side of the arch. Hypnos at the top doesn't need an arrow at this point, though later there was of course plenty of worked packed around him. I of course signed up for a double shift in the overnight, and figured if the firing didn’t end on my shift I would just stay until it finished anyway. I can’t lie, it felt a little weird doing a short firing with so many people. Last December I did a 24 hour firing at the NCC wood kiln, but there were way fewer people, and I did the last 17 hours of that firing non-stop. Before my shifts, I did a lot of hanging out at the kiln watching others do all the work, which was very strange for me. Firing the anagama for a full week, everthing happened slower. I felt like by the time I adjusted to the rhythm of this firing, it was over.  A shorter firing means a shorter cool-down period. After the anagama, we left and came back the next week. But since this was only a 24 hour firing, we stayed while the kiln cooled. That was when Josh DeWeese switched into high gear, spending a whole day and the following morning in a marathon making demo. It made me tired just to watch him, 😂 ! His sense of humor was delightful, I don’t know how he managed to tell fun and illuminating stories while he made incredible work and simultaneously explained what he was doing and gave insightful tips. I frequently botch demos because I’m so busy trying to explain what I’m doing that I can’t do it. (Once I joked I can’t chew gum and walk at the same time, and one of my students, apparently never having heard that expression, took me seriously, and said “really?!”) I absorbed so much from Josh DeWeese!!! Not just technique, or art-but how to make a supportive positive space in which people can best learn. His teaching is nothing short of spectacular, he gets it right from every possible angle. Generosity is the term that springs to mind. He really gave of himself, and he’s got a lot to give.
 Among the many pieces he made was this "liquor set" including cups, ewer and platter. You can see a giant platter that he made in the upper right hand corner.
When we gathered to unload the kiln, he coached us; “the appropriate response when something comes out of the kiln is Ooh! Ah!!” He had us all reapeat the oohing and aching until we reached an appropriate level of positive enthusiasm. He said not to be dissapointed if something didn’t turn out as expected; to live with it before making judgments. That bit of advice I had heard before, but it is so true with woodfiring in particular. You often get something out of the kiln that is not at all what you were going for-and it can take a while to figure out if that’s a good or a bad thing.  One of my smaller vases, hot out of the kiln. The East 40 clay can totally take over a glaze. I had to apply the glaze at the top on his crown of leaves/feathers incredibly thick for it to show up at all. I felt like the pace of the workshop was perfect. I got enough rest that I could absorb all the new experiences and information like a sponge, but at the same time, there was never a dull moment. I’m still absorbing and working with what I learned, and will be for some time to come.
Finally, the thing that astounded me most about the Josh DeWeese workshop was that it did exactly what a vacation is supposed to do. I felt like I got out of the usual grind, experienced wonder, and gave me time to reflect on just how blessed I really am. It’s now a few weeks since the workshop and I’ve been working a lot, but that feeling is still with me. @ Book and Puppet March 15 – June 7 2025 Loom raising 5-8 Friday March 28 Reception 3-6 p.m. Saturday April 26 This coming week I am going to be hanging a solo exhibition” curated by Arta Brito that brings together my recent work from the past few years, the fiber, painting and ceramic. I was so happy that Arta could see the connection between growing plants to dye recycled fabric and make paints, for example, with making clay and ceramic glazes from local materials. I’m literally going to the earth for my materials, and participating in historical, even ancient forms of making. In a world that is becoming ever more virtual and artificial, I hope people can enjoy the “grounding” of this work when viewing it as much as I felt when making it. The fixed parts of the show will be up by March 15, available for viewing during all of Book & Puppet’s regular hours. There will be a “loom raising” event on Friday March 28, the public is invited to come and help me construct a warp-weighted loom in the gallery! I will demonstrate how I take old bed sheets, clothing etc. and turn them into cord or “t-shirt yarn” that can be used for weaving. I’m going to use the loom and naturally dyed, repurposed fiber to do a weaving on this loom over the course of the exhibition. This show will have the finished 27 foot weaving that I made on the loom I built in the East Stroudsburg University Madelon Powers Gallery for my 2021 solo exhibition there. (See photo below.)  Before I did the warp weighted loom, I used a pin loom to “sketch” in the same naturally dyed, reclaimed fibers I eventually used in the warp-weighted loom. These modules were the models for the large paintings I made-on repurposed, reclaimed fabric of course-that are also in the exhibition. Since the modules are small, they can “dance” around the exhibition space, there are two dozen of them, see if you can find them all!  While dyeing the fabric, I was kind of gob-smacked to learn that some of the pigments that I had been painting with for decades were originally made using leftover dye baths! I took a deep dive into making my own pigments, and paint during my residency at the NCC East 40. I did a series of imaginary landscapes on clay panels I made, where ALL of the colors were paints I had made from pigments I processed. This show will include most of these imaginary landscapes. So for example you can see weavings that include fiber dyed with madder root, and paintings that use paint made from the leftovers of the dye bath used to dye that fiber in the same show. These natural landscapes also include paints made from clay dug from the NCC East 40, and ceramic works made utilizing that same clay. The ceramic works are the most recent, except of course for the weaving that will be performed over the course of the show.
A through-line and progression here are the materials-from the earth-that are used in all the work.
 When I began working in ceramics all those years ago (the 1970’s!) I can recall being disappointed, first in high school and then in college, at the “lack” of color in the available glazes. We all had our boxes of crayons bursting with color, and even the cheapest mass-produced consumer goods were glaring with color. Even today, consumer goods (even foods) are bursting with artificial color. We inhabit mostly a built environment (how often are you out in nature?) where a cacophony of accidental color prevails. For example, I’m thinking of a very tastefully designed lounge, with all the furnishings and carpets and such color coordinated-inhabited by people sporting all kinds of colors, carrying bags and things with even more crashing colors that were most decidedly not a part of the designer’s scheme. I think we learn to ignore all these clashing colors as some kind of self-defense mechanism.  I have to admit, it could be age. But it could also be looking at lots of great pottery-Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Michael Cardew, Phil Rogers, Matthew Blakey and plenty of works by unknown potters in museums-I’m coming to appreciate the palette of winter. It’s like a palette cleanser for the eyes. For me, the browns aren’t neutral. Some are russet, some cool, some tawny, and these browns are punctuated (some days) with blue sky, and evergreens wearing their dark green winter coats. And when it snows, the blue sky is replaced by white, silver and a range of greys as varied as the browns they cover, to varying extents depending on how much it snowed. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the deep saturated colors of medieval stained glass, for example, but I’m also appreciating the subtle symphony of colors that winter offers.
Even as a child I loved drawing bare trees, fascinated by the spooky dark trunks and branches, the more gnarled the better. But the NCC East 40 is mostly meadow. The mountains, ocean and even forest that I always tended to associate with “nature” just are not there. Much like the winter palette of colors, which I’m enjoying more and more, I’ve come to appreciate the subtlety of the forms of the meadow. Today a new revised reprint of Bernard Leach’s classic tome “A Potter’s Book” arrived. This edition has color versions of most of the pottery examples, and they are very much in keeping with the winter landscape. Right now I’m perfectly content to inhabit the colors of winter. 
I knew I wanted to use gold on my ceramics before I even knew why! Real gold will evaporate, “volatilize” is the technical term, if exposed to the high temperatures needed to fire the clays that I use. I confirmed this the hard way, three years ago I embedded some tiny bits of gold foil around the rim of a pot, and even in the preliminary “bisque” firing (not as hot as the final glaze firing) the pot emerged from the kiln without a trace of the gold. You’ve probably seen fine china that has gold trim or accents, for example around the edges. The way it’s done, is that you glaze and fire the whole thing first, without the gold, at the usual high temperature. Then, you apply the gold and fire at a much lower temperature to “fix” the gold permanently onto the ceramic. This is what’s called an “overglaze,” and what I finally got around to doing!
With wood firing, you can’t control exactly how anything is going to come out, and honestly the serendipity of it is a huge part of the attraction. But sometimes a piece comes out of the wood firing and, well, needs some help. Well, I had some pieces that just needed a little oomph, a little spark, an accent.Two of them had a lovely, ivory colored satiny glaze surface; but they were to subtle, they needed an accent, some pop. On the other end of the spectrum, I had a piece with a kind of mottled surface, mostly quite dark. Finally, I had a piece that had quite nice “flashing”-effects of the fire on the clay, which highlighted the sculptural form really well-but the surface was quite dull and matte, no shine.
 Opening up a wood kiln is like unwrapping Christmas presents-you may have an idea what to expect, on the other hand, you can get some real surprises! What I find the most strange, is how difficult it can be to figure out if the surprises are good or bad. It can take months, even a year or more to really “digest” the serendipitous effects off flame, wood ash and the myriad variables of the firing.
I had two sculptural, medieval inspired vases in the kiln, both had a salt-white glaze, and came out weirdly brown speckled. My first response was yuck, not what I had hoped for-and not what I had got from the same clay and glaze combination in Previous wood firings in the same kiln! In fact, there was another vase in this firing, same clay, same glaze, but it was a re-fire from the previous firing. In that previous firing, there were parts of the kiln that just didn’t get hot enough to properly melt the glaze. But this time, that pot came out with a kind of lovely glow-I’m so glad I re-fired it. But what of the two speckle monsters? Hmmm. Not so sure about those, have to sleep on that for a few months.  Then there were the mug re-fires. These were all made from “C Body” East 40 clay, and had been through a 6 day anagama firing this past October. They too must have been in cold spots in that firing, the glazes were rough and underfed. This is a clay I formulated less than a year ago, so I’m keenly interested in putting it to the test in every way possible. I had pieces in the Peter’s Valley anagama firing, in locations of the kiln that got up to cone 11 (the clay was formulated for cone 10) and there was no trouble at all. No flaws of any kind in the clay. There were also no flaws after the October 6 day anagama firing-but this re-fire kind of “fried” them, since they were located in parts of the kiln that overshot the firing range of this clay body. Let me explain.
We used cone packs that had two cones below our target, (cones 8 & 9) our target cone (10) and a “guard” cone of 11. In the photos, the order from left to right is 8,9,10,11. In the first photo, you can see a perfect 10.The number 10 cone (third from left) is making a perfect arc, the tip down to the level of the base. There is daylight under the arc, as there should be. By contrast, the lower temp cones 8 & 9 are no longer an arc, they are a puddle, and cone 11 is only beginning to bend. In the second cone pack, there is no daylight anywhere under these cones, even cone 11 is a melted puddle on top of the clay that held the cones in place. What this means is that in that section of the kiln, we blew past our goal of cone 10, and because 11 is a puddle we must have actually hit cone 12. I found out the hard way the upper limit of the C body clay; it was fine at cone 11, but cone 12 was just too much. One of them cracked early enough in the firing that the glaze hadn’t melted yet, since, the glaze healed over the crack completely. Another had little bloat bubbles. The work had been over-fired enough to become so brittle that several of them had chips that broke off the bottom where there was no glaze to support the clay. To be fair, they were really close to the firebox, which hit at least two cones above our target, as explained above. And in spite of the flaws in some of them, others have no visible flaws and they certainly didn’t melt into a puddle or even slump, which can happen when a low-fire clay is high-fired.
I fired an odd little piece I had done as a demo for texturing slabs, and making a draped form with visible slab joins from them. On the inside I sprayed on the East 40 ash glaze (that I formulated) in a fairly thin layer, and the outside was a combination of two different shinos and a salt white glaze and a little bit of the East 40 ash. For a little throwaway pot-I was going to just recycle the clay after the demo, but decided to keep it to just to experiment with glazes-I’m surprised at how good it looks.
In short, the work I cared most about-the medieval inspired vases-came out just whatever, while the piece that took me 10 minutes to make came out great. Or at least that’s what I think today. Maybe I’ll wake up in 6 months and have a totally different opinion. Please comment and let me know what you think! Please note: these videos take a while to load. (Having technical problems and don't have enough hours to throw at solving them right now) The burn ban was finally lifted, and on December 18 we finally began the firing. The two anagama firings I did in August and October went on for 5-6 days; but this firing was scheduled to be completed in just over 24 hours. To get the work “fully cooked” meant that we had to actually reach higher temperatures in the kiln than would be the case if we were firing over many days. The cones behind the removable bricks were our only way we could be sure when the work in the kiln was fully “cooked.” The heatwork needed to achieve cone 10, our goal, is considered to be 2,381 degrees. That level of heatwork can be reached by more time at over 2,100 degrees, but for a one day firing we were going to need all 2,381 degrees to get cone 10 to bend over. Gabby Gentile and Connor McGaughran (my student worker at ESU) had been there since 2 in the afternoon, and stayed with me well past their points of exhaustion until after Dave Graham (Kiln Building Guru) was able to join me. With two fireboxes needing to be stoked every few minutes, this was a skeleton crew. It was after midnight that Gabby and Connor finally went home, and it was just Dave and I for the rest of the night, until the end of the firing the next morning. I took the left firebox, and Dave the right. It’s crazy how kilns have a personality, and how two fireboxes that should be identical, one right next to the other, can behave so differently. The left side of the kiln runs colder, the coals don’t burn down to ash fast enough, so the left firebox can get so choked with coals that it restricts the needed airflow on that side. How much, what size and what kind of wood to put in, and when, are decisions that are constantly being made. You don’t just chuck wood into the kiln and hope it works; this too is an art. Pine combusts faster, but doesn’t have the staying power of hard wood, it’s kind of like a sugar high, you either feed soft wood constantly or it can crash. Hard wood can actually make the temperature drop while it’s trying to combust. Likewise, the thinner the wood is cut, the faster it catches fire-and burns out. Getting the right mix of types and sizes of wood, how much room you leave open in the firebox, how often you stoke-all this has to be right, or the kiln will let you know. There’s a wonderful “roar” when a kiln is really hot, and it’s happily digesting just the right amount of wood.  Sunrise at the East 40-one of the perks of doing all-nighter's at the kiln is getting to see the sunrise The night was beautiful. It would have been cold being out all night like that, but the kiln generated so much heat that being so close, I didn’t need most of the layers of clothing I had brought. The wind was going in the right direction, I think it actually helped us. Pyrometers that measure the air temperature in the kiln are not terribly accurate at the higher temperatures, but they do let us know if the kiln is getting hotter or cooler, which is critical information for figuring out when to stoke for example. As the kiln heats up, everything wants to expand. I’m glad Dave was there when one of the steel tie rods holding the kiln together popped under the pressure! Wow, that made me jump. He had just replaced the tie rod above the one that broke, and assured me it would be fine. You could see the other tie rods bow with the pressure the kiln was exerting as it expanded, but they held. Even if we hadn’t had the pyrometers, as in olden times, you can really tell when a kiln gets up to those higher temperatures well in excess of two thousand degrees! At 9 something in the morning, Cone 10 had made it’s perfect arc on the top right, and both cone 10 and 11 weirdly were bending together on the bottom left; we got to our goal. Once we reached our cone 10 goal, we stuffed the fireboxes as full as we could get them, then shut off all access of air to the kiln. Kilns go crazy when you do this! Any tiny sliver of space, around a brick, around a door, the flame tries to reach out, gasping for oxygen. That’s when you walk around the kiln-any gaps anywhere become really obvious with flame shooting out of them! The “door” of the kiln is temporary, rebuilt for every firing, so flames shooting out from there are not a problem. But if places that should be tight open up, this is when you find them. The fire just burns itself out, smothers-then you have to wait, and wait, for it to cool down. The bigger the kiln, the better insulated it is, the longer it takes. This post is already way too long, so you have to look at my next post for the unloading!
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