Cindy Vojnovic
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Paintings' Progress

12/31/2022

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Imaginary Landscape #3. Is it done? Not sure.
The hard thing about imaginary landscapes on clay (see my first post on these) is that it’s so difficult to know when they are “done.” The interaction of translucent paint over the texture of the clay slabs can look so good in the early stages that it’s hard to know if any more is needed. I showed two paintings in the ESU Faculty show this fall that were minimally worked, but I’ve decided to add more to both of them because while I liked them from close up, from a distance they weren’t reading very well. And, as I had worked more and more into other paintings while those two were out of the studio in the faculty show, I decided I liked more layering. My fear had been that the more layers of paint, the less the clay would play an integral role in the painting. But after adding a lot of layers on some of the paintings I realized that the “clay-ness” of the pieces was still playing a big role in the work. 

I need to take more photos, but, here are a few paintings as they are at the moment-the paintings’ progress. 
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Imaginary Landscape #6. I thought this was done, and actually exhibited it. Then I decided it wasn't done, did more work and intend to keep working on it.
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This one is done. I think.
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Imaginary Landscape #4. Not done.
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Clay and FIRE part 2

12/4/2022

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I was so busy telling the story of firing the old wood kiln in part 1, I didn't include all the photos I had picked to go along with it! For more information of what these are about, ready part 1 from December 2, 2022.
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Here I am stoking the kiln early in the day.
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You can tell a kiln is in reduction if you pull the plug from one of the peep holes, and flame comes shooting out like this! The fire is starved for oxygen, so it's reaching out through the peephole to get it.
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If you have this much fire shooting out the chimney, you are in HEAVY reduction.
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Dave Graham doing his spear and raking magic to keep logs from clogging up the passage to the ware chamber above
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In part 1 this was still wet on the wheel. Here it is fully fired. None of the other pots had protrusions like this one. I think that's because I had put woad inside, and we capped it with aluminum foil so that the woad vapors would stay inside. Something about that made whatever impurities were in the clay kind of pop out. This was the A body garden gold you saw me mixing in part 1 of this post.
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The shine you see on this is entirely from wood ash deposit, it was not glazed.
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This is the outside view of the cup above. I used 100% garden gold clay (dug from the East 40) using a brush I made from grasses at the East 40 to make the bush marks on the side. This was a commercial 119 clay body. I had made this for a demo before making the A and B body clays from the East 40 "garden gold."
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Clay and Fire, Part I

12/3/2022

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Why would anyone want to go to the trouble of firing a wood kiln-the firing can take days of constant attention and fire-stoking when they could just use an electric kiln that you can program to do all the work? Wood kilns are not common, many ceramic students and artists never get the opportunity to find out. In October, I had the amazing opportunity to help fire a wood kiln. I even got the honor of lighting the right side of the kiln. I knew something about the process before I had he actual experience; the fire surrounds the clay and deposits ash on what is being fired, creating serendipitous effects that simply can’t be achieved in any other way. But there is also a community aspect, and yeah, it’s somehow embarrassingly satisfying to play with more than two thousand degrees of fire. ​
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Right, AnWirthiemdrew Storck, me (Cindy Vojnovic) and left, Ellie Wirthiem, after rebuilding the firebox of the old kiln
Between Covid and a groundhog undermining the kiln, the old woodfire kiln hadn’t been fired in years. Luckily the groundhog had vacated the premises when Andrew Storck and I took on the task of rebuilding the firebox. This is not something I would have attempted on my own, but I was keen to help because that’s the best way to learn about the kiln construction-to literally rip it open and see how it works. Unlike store-bought kilns, wood kilns are built as one-offs, and whoever built it has many choices to make. We had no idea what we were getting into, or how long it would take. Ellie Wirthiem joined in and we got the firebox of the kiln taken apart and put back together again faster than any of us anticipated. It was such a great feeling-glad I took a selfie to capture that burst of joy. 
However excited we were at getting the old kiln back together again, we had no idea if our modifications would work, or not, or if there were other problems with the kiln from sitting for years unused, so it was decided not to make the changes too permanent and to do a test firing. Another factor was that in the past, that kiln had never been fired hotter than cone 6, which is about 2,200 F. A new wood kiln is under construction that is designed to go hotter, to cone 10 which is 2,385 F. That might not seem like a lot, but once you get to a certain temperature, it’s really a struggle to get a wood kiln hotter. Also, a clay “body” (recipe, if you will) that works at cone 6 could warp or even melt into a puddle on the kiln shelf at cone 10. In fact, testing clay for the cone 10 wood kiln environment was a compelling reason to fire up the old kiln. That way, once the new kiln is completed we have a reliable clay recipe to use in it. 
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Me, mixing up the first batch of Body A "garden gold" cone 10 clay-photo by Kelly Allen
Walter Heath, who is the alchemist behind the clay getting mined and processed from the East 40 in the first place, came up with 2 recipes to serve as a starting point for a cone 10 clay body. They both featured what we call the “garden gold,” the local clay mined from the East 40. While I had no previous experience firing a wood kiln, I do have experience mixing clay, so I was happy to take on that task. There are machines specially made to mix clay, which I had used in my undergraduate days when I worked as a paid assistant in the ceramics department, but we don’t have that machinery so I just used a sturdy tub and a powerful drill with an agitator attachment, for want of a better way to describe it. Without the heavy machinery, you can’t mix the clay with only the amount of water needed for the finished clay; you have to add lots of water and so end up with smooth, nicely mixed clay soup. After hydrating for at least a couple of days, the soup (called slip) has to be poured out onto water-absorbing plaster slabs to get it to a workable consistency, so the clay-making is at least a 5 day process. 
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The first form I kept, thrown from "Garden Gold" A body, see next post for how it came out of the wood fired kiln!
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    Cindy Vojnovic

    Artist & Educator

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  • Home
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  • Blog
  • Portfolio
    • Recent Work
    • Imaginary Landscapes
    • 2022 Residency
    • Crossing >
      • Fiber Cycling
      • Slow Fashion
    • General Slocum Disaster
    • Sanofi Commission
    • Paintings of Nowhere
    • Byzantine Icons
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    • Ceramics-Technical >
      • Ceramics Links
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      • Melt Test
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    • About Teaching
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