I had two main reasons for going to the bi-annual Stahl Potter festival on June 15. One, I found out James Chaney, who I studied with 1978-80, was going to be there and I just had to tell him in person how great his instruction had been, and how I was building on it all these years later. The other of course was to see the historic pottery, and in particular the wood burning kiln. ​

Not long after I met the man who has now been my husband for 25 years, he asked me what kind of architecture I liked best. It’s not a question anyone had asked me before, but my pause was under a minute; Victorian Gothic. What might practitioners of Victorian Gothic such as A. W. Pugin or John Pollard Seddon, for example, possibly have to do with a Pennsylvania Dutch Pottery-or Colonial Revival for that matter? Yes, I know this seems very fractured, but it was the trip to Stahl’s Pottery, and reading the book “Stahl’s  Pottery of Powder Valley” that connected the dots. My mother despised all things Victorian and idolized all things colonial, so that adds a family historical twist to this aesthetic conflagration. Let me begin to unpack this aesthetic cacophony. 

The book has a chapter “Arts and Crafts and the Colonial Revival” and the “Arts and Crafts Movement” was invoked on multiple occasions as I toured the pottery and museum. When I think “Arts and Crafts” I think of 19th century and especially British artists; William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones for example, and if American, maybe Gustav Stickley, not of Colonial American revival. But there are commonalities, and my visit to the Stahl pottery got me thinking about them-and my own heritage. It’s easy to think of any revival, be it Victorian Gothic, Colonial or Arts and Crafts Movement, as an imitation; as something less-than the original. But William Morris, whose designs are still popular, did not simply copy older prototypes-he made new designs for a new age, an age that keenly felt the loss of the individual craftsman in mass-manufacture. (It’s a bit mind-breaking that mass manufacture is overwhelmingly how those of us in the twenty first century have ready access to his designs.) And that was the big epiphany-that these “Historiated” styles, when done right, are new inventions originating out of the needs and circumstances of their own times, not less-than imitations of something that is done and over. 

The Stahl brothers learned pottery from their Victorian father. In the early twentieth Century they shut down the pottery they inherited/tried to carry on from their father, because they couldn’t compete with mass-manufacture. But they opened their own pottery three decades later because the values of the Arts and Crafts movement begun in the nineteenth century had taken root here, in the twentieth century, and the literal value of the kind of work they had done for their father had multiplied. In the midst of the Great Depression no less, the Stahl bothers opened an old style pottery with wood kiln, what is now the Stahl’s Pottery Historical site https://www.stahlspottery.org. 

I didn’t see my mom’s fascination with the colonial as more than her personal taste; I didn’t see it as part of a larger historical phenomenon. My mother seldom could use the word “Victorian” without the accompanying adjective “monstrosity.” (I suppose my way of rebelling against my mom was a Victorian aesthetic.) I was missing the through lines, of Arts and Crafts, Colonial Revival and my own  aesthetics. The Stahl brothers weren’t imitating the work of previous potters; they were doing their own work. The interesting thing with arts and crafts is that when you do things with your own hands, it’s actually hard not to put yourself into what you’re doing, even if you’re using traditional materials and techniques. And those who pick up those pots, or look at those paintings or wear that hand knitted sweater etc. see that human element, which only becomes more precious the more impersonal products become in our society. 

Adding Wood Ash to East 40 Clay
This test uses only two ingredients. Going left to right, I added increments of more wood ash to the East 40 clay. A few notes about this; for the ceramic artists out there, this was cone 6 oxidation. It's obvious that the 5 parts clay to one part ash is not nearly enough ash. (The ash is used as a flux, that is, to help melt the clay into a glaze.) I made impressions into each square with a finger, making a kind of "lake" within each square, and also applied the glaze unevenly to see how various thicknesses of the glaze would work. I'm working with such tiny amounts here that of course more testing is needed to nail down percentages, but it's pretty clear that the wood ash I was using, which was from the wood kiln at the East 40, needs to be over half the mix to melt the clay. I'm currently working on glazes for cone 10, so at that hotter temperature obviously everything will melt more than at this cone 6 (lower temperature) test. 

Adding a colorant
I wish I had done the line blend of just the clay and wood ash first! Here there isn't enough wood ash in the mix to start, and as you add a colorant like copper carbonate, that tends to retard melting and make matters worse. Note that even .3 grams is way too much colorant for a first step! Instead of green, which we would expect from copper carbonate, we're almost at black. That's why I start with simple line blends-I'm not using much in materials to get this kind of information that points me in the directions I should go. 

Above, I used 4 g of East 40 clay to 2 parts of a commercially produced flux, the same percentage of clay to wood ash from the last test. The commercial flux has a stronger action but even so, it's under-melted.  I'm using a commercial mason stain for the colorant. The main problem is that the clay when properly melted into a glaze is so inherently dark, it's hard to notice much color difference from the base glaze at left with no colorant. 

In the basic mix at left before I started adding rutile, it's melting ok but not great. Rutile can add color, texture and odd what I'll just call variations to the look of a glaze. Like the cobalt carbonate, it also makes the glaze more matte, or under-melted, under vitrified in ceramic terminology. Matte glazes are a thing, we don't always want super glossy glazes, but they can be more prone to leaching and other defects/weaknesses. I do want to do more tests with rutile going forward, just that every time I add an increment of rutile I know I need to add an increment of flux (melter) at the same time. 
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​The way-back story
I first used this clay when I was working on my master’s thesis, using a simple mix of half East 40 clay and half of a commercially available clay to make loom weights. (See crossing in my portfolio section) In my summer of 2022 Residency at the East 40, I used the clay, raw and roasted in a bonfire, as pigments for paints that I made and used in the “Imaginary Landscape” series of paintings that were featured in my Fall 2022 solo exhibition. During the residency, Walter Heath saw me grinding up rocks for pigments, and immediately had visions of using them to develop glazes. That summer I wasn’t ready to go there-but in 2023 I began preliminary testing, not just for the East 40 clay, but from local rocks I had picked up and processed. In this post I’m only showing the initial line blends I did with the East 40 clay, omitting all the rock glaze tests and tests on clay I dug out of my front yard-it’s a long enough post as is!