As promised, some results from the test kiln firing. After making the part 1 post, I realized that it was just too technical for a blog post. I reached a kind of crossroads where I realized I needed to create a section of the website for technical information. If you want something more in depth than this post, go to my new Ceramics-Technical page, and the pages that branch off of it.
The little test kiln did reach cone 10 (approx. 2,381 F) but not without a battle of many hours in the sweltering heat.  Luckily, it was worth it. The firing gave us really critical information; how will the new clay body behave at high-fire temperature in reduction (oxygen starved)  kiln atmosphere, which is how we fire the wood kiln? And, how will the 25 glaze recipe variations with the East 40 clay look and behave on the new clay body? Overall, the results were a smashing success. Both clay body, glazes, and the way the glazes look on the clay body passed with flying colors. Again, I'm not going to go into all the technical results here, but I do want to show you some of the highlights of what came out of the little kiln. 

In the test bars above, you can see the color of the clay with no glaze for yourself. In addition to the tile in the test kiln firing, the dark one at the bottom of the photo, Gabbry Gentile was kind enough to fire the one on top in the electric kiln up at the ceramics studio in Penn Hall on the main campus. I formulated this clay body for high temperature firings like we do in the wood kiln at the East 40; the real shocker, was that this clay body works at the medium range temperature used in the studio on campus! I won't go into the technical details here, but suffice it to say I was honestly shocked at how well this clay performed in an electric kiln at mid-range temperature! 

Ash glazes are supposed to show dramatic drips; the trick is, you don't want them to run off the pot. This test tile was photographed on its back because of sun glare, but it was standing up on vertical when fired in the kiln. The pleasant surprise was that all the variations of the ash glaze stayed up on the tile, none of them ran off the tile at the bottom which is a big problem with a lot of ash glazes. Many ash glazes can only be used at the top of the pot, they are so runny. This was the runniest variation, and even it didn't run off the tile. Long story short, we already have usable glazes based on the East 40 clay and wood ash, and they work great on the new clay body!

Above is the simplest glaze recipe I tested-and my favorite result! The drips are less dramatic without the eggshell. It's such stable glaze that I can see using it on an entire pot, not just at the top for a drippy effect. The color comes primarily from whatever is in the East 40 clay, educated guess, a lot of iron. 
Getting back to the vase at the top of this post, the dark part at the top is the same as the tile above, except there is an addition of copper oxide. The pot was first dipped in a glaze we had on hand from previous wood kiln firings, we wanted to see how it worked on the new clay body. The red you see, especially on the view to the right is actually from the copper-rich glaze I was testing at the top! All in all, we got lots of very helpful information from the test kiln firing. In all honesty, I didn't expect this much success in a first time at full-temperature firing!
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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!

There is something about the weirdness, and richness of Medieval Art that has been an inspiration to me ever since I can remember. But just in this past year, I came across a Medieval wine pitcher (see photo above) that pitched me into a new series of work in ceramics.

I love that this guy’s hands are circles with lines through them, and his arms a simple single string of clay. I love that we still see them as hands and arms; I could give many more examples on this and other pieces but the point is, it’s this leap of imagination that intrigues me. Bestiaries are another related concept in medieval art that inspires me, how species could be mixed and matched, and become a new creature such as a griffin. And finally, I have always loved the flat out decoration of Medieval and Gothic things, from buildings to furniture to textiles etc. What fascinates me about the Medieval decoration is how a very few simple geometic forms can become incredibly rich and varied with repetition. These three medieval inspirations-weird abstraction, mixing of species and repetitive ornament-became the basis for a whole series of work in ceramics. ​

Oops-I had a solo exhibition of my imaginary landscape series and never made a blog post about it. Well, you can see the paintings in the Recent Work portfolio section of this site! 

I’ve begun a new series of paintings I’m calling Requiem, based on photographs of deceased people that have had an impact on my life. I really liked the broken, distressed slabs of clay that I used in the Imaginary Landscape series, and leaned into that when making slabs for this new project. I have found deciding on what photo references to use to be  way more difficult than I could have imagined, not to mention deciding who to paint. 

For the first in the series I decided to paint my mother, who died when I was 17 and she was 51. As you can imagine, I have countless photographs I could have worked from, but for some reason I chose literally the very first photo that was ever taken of her, in May of 1927. The photo is of course black and white, and it’s blown out and blurry, but there is something so evocative about the photo I followed my instinct and used it. Here is a work-in-progress shot, sorry it’s on the weird old green cutting mat that’s on my desk. I like the Zoomed in view because you can see how the cracks/texture in the clay work with the painting and there is less of the distracting green mat visible. Of course once it’s finished, I’ll do a better photo of the entire painting. 

What I’ve read is that Woad should be planted in March, and harvested at its peak in July. Well, I din’t plant this year until June and July, and didn’t have a chance to harvest until this week, in mid-October. 

I was able to draw on all my experience. First, I only bothered with the best leaves. The new, not so big and not so small deep green ones. I ignored the temptation of those huge leaves-by the time they get that big, I have discovered through eco-prints (see my Where is the Woad post) that they don’t have enough pigment to bother with them. I didn’t pick that much, because I wanted to try one new thing-a different source of alkali, namely water soaked in the wood ash from the NCC East 40 kiln. I soaked the ash nearly a year ago, and wasn’t sure if it would lose any of its power in that time. 

There were so few leaves they looked lonely in the bottom of my smallest dye pot. But they yielded enough pigment to show that the leaves have plenty of pigment in them right now-and that I've got my process worked out. 

Here’s a summary of the process: 

1. Pour near boiling water over the fresh leaves and let steep for 15 minutes.
2. After 15 minutes, I mashed the leaves with a wooden spatula and stirred until the liquid was a transparent rust color. Other people have described it as sherry colored, but mine was more orange than red.
3. Strain out the leaves, squeezing as much liquid out of them as possible.
4. Pour the liquid from one container to another 20 pours, to begin oxygenating.
5. Pour in some alkali-I used the clear liquid of water that had been soaked in wood ash for weeks. The color immediately darkened significantly. 
6. Aerate (pouring back and forth from dye pot to in my case a clean bucket) until you see the froth turn blue. I used a white bucket; that made it much easier to see the froth color. The liquid at this point was deep emerald green.
7. Pour into a strainer with a cloth in it. At first, the weave of the cloth is open and so some of the precious woad particles will get through. Look at the color of the liquid that has drained through the cloth; if it’s greenish, pour it through the cloth again. 
8. After the liquid has gone through the cloth (this can take hours!) there should be yellow liquid that has been strained out-you can throw this away. What is left in the cloth is your pigment! I spread it onto a sheet of glass so it can dry out, then scrape the dried powder into a jar. 

In powdered form, the pigment can last indefinitely. You can use it in a reduction vat the same as indigo-woad has the same active ingredient as indigo. Or, you can make paint out of it. 

Where is the woad pigment in the plant? The pat answer I’ve heard is “in the leaves.” Not always, I just discovered. 

In one of the Michel Garcia DVD’s I bought, he makes prints from woad by simply mashing the leaves into cloth with a hammer. He then washed the cloth with a neutral dishwashing liquid (Dawn) and the non-permanent green washed out, leaving a print where the blue pigment was visible. I tried it, and realized the implications almost immediately. The pigment isn’t where I thought it was. I had been harvesting the huge outer leaves, with the idea to give the new leaves room to grow. While that pruning approach worked to make the plants grow like weeds, I had a hard time getting pigment. Here’s that first print.

You can see, that the blue is NOT in the big leaves or the stems-there are only the faintest traces of blue in the big leaves. In fact, another print made at the same time as this one, was left outside in the sun and rain. The green vanished completely, but the blue stayed. The blue-the desirable pigment we get from woad-is very stable over centuries, as the Unicorn Tapestries etc. clearly show. The other stuff in the woad “goes away” with the action of water and sun-and that is something I was able to put to good use, more on that later. The point is, the light green you see in the photo above is NOT the pigment, and will vanish. The blue is what I’m looking for. And I didn’t find it in the big leaves-it was far more concentrated in the small leaves!
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I want to do these woad leave prints on a regular basis to track where the pigment is-and when. On February 14 this year (2023) I made another print. I made the print in a slightly different way, so as not to use up so much of the bamboo rayon fabric; instead of folding the fabric in half and the leaves in the middle, I put paper on one side and fabric on the other. I also used a smoother surface underneath them, with the idea of not losing any of the print to the “valleys” of the concrete block I had used for the first print. The cloth side was blurry and harder to see than the paper side, so in the photo below you see the leaves arranged on top, and the print on the paper below. The print wasn’t as good overall as the one from summer, so maybe the rough concrete block was better?

Another surprise-the pigment had left the leaves, but was now in the stems! In summer, it was the opposite. Not only that, it was the larger leaves with the thicker stems that had the pigment, not the smaller leaves. So apparently in the colder weather, while the woad does not go brown and dormant or die like most plants here in Pennsylvania over the winter, the pigment in the plant moves around. So if I want to harvest pigment in winter, do what I mistakenly did in summer, and use the larger leaves! Interesting.

I had heard that once the plant looks purple, the pigment is destroyed. Yesterday I picked a selection that was purple in various places. Since I was at home and didn’t have a concrete block, I used one of the concrete steps to my house. The result was terrible, sorry, it makes the photo very hard to “read.” But if you look closely enough, there is no real blue, only purple and green, both of which are fugitive. Every source says the purple leaves are ruined for pigment production, and my own test confirms this.

My residency at the NCC East 40 began on June 1, so I didn’t get to plant the woad until a few days into June last year. This year I plan to sow in March as is considered optimum. Woad needs wet to germinate, and isn’t much bothered by cold. That’s next month! Now that I have the eco-print test (mashing the plant onto cloth and/or paper) I plan to do it both on the 2023 crop and the 2022 crop, to see how much pigment is where when! This will give me much more specific information than I have been able to find in any source. 

Finally, there was another huge “Aha!” moment that I had inspired from the eco-print process; I can use sunlight as well as water to help get rid of the impurities. Last summer I was processing a large batch of woad leaves that I later learned low pigment content from doing that first eco print. I could tell there was pigment, but there was also a lot of the fugitive yellow that I needed to get out. I did what Garcia showed in his DVD, which is to wash the pigment. You use a fine mesh cloth to catch the pigment, but the fugitive yellow is soluble in water and gets washed through. Every time I rinsed, the pigment got less green looking (from the fugitive yellow) and more blue. But after a half-dozen washings, and all that waiting for the liquid to go through the cloth to the bucket below, I got frankly tired of my kitchen being a mass of buckets and strainers. I dried out the pigment, put it in glass, and put it in the window that gets the most sun. I shake up the little jar periodically, and it continues to improve, at this point I’ve actually used a little in in some paintings. Now that the eco prints are helping me to understand what to harvest when, I won’t have to deal with such an annoying batch again!

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. 

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.

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. ​

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.