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the last firing for FEAST

Posted jane -->on 28th Feb 2009

today the last firing for FEAST  was sort of unremarkable – after all, it was just more of the same – more or less.

the last four dishes came out as expected, now I know how to manage them. I like this one best, as the tidepath has a different shape.

two more flasks; this one in the terracotta crank and the crawling shino glaze, which is a combination I like very much.

another of the bottles with the porcelain overlay and beaten with the butter pat paddle has come out very well, I think, with the opaque matt pale green that this copper glaze makes with porcelain.

reduction was heavier on this firing than the last three, with a lot of sooting on the kiln where gas escaped and burnt off. I am not sure if it made any difference. I know my glazes and clay bodies work a lot better with reduction all the way from 1030/50C to cone 11.

I have made a mock-up of what FEAST will look like; of course the table is about half as wide, and not even half as long as I intend the table in the gallery to be – and in the workshop I had to find up an old blank and primed canvas as a backdrop.

I was worried that the fact that every dish is different would look a bit untidy, but I think as long as there is a table setting pattern to the placing of everything it will read how I want it to.

more images here

reedbeds and marram grass hills

Posted jane -->on 27th Feb 2009

today was mild and dry and I gave myself a day off, so I took the dogs to Burnham Overy, and we walked across the marshes to the dunes and the beach.

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there were plenty of Brent geese and other waterfowl out on the marsh, but it seems the pink footed geese are on their way back to Iceland and Greenland.

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everything is still pretty dead looking – the reedbeds don’t give much cover now, until those dried out stems are replaced with new growth. larks singing above though make it sound like spring.

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the marram grass is bleached white, and all the mosses and lichens nibbled close on the dunes by the rabbits. all the rabbit earthworks are very exciting for the dogs. Sal is getting a bit past it now, but Til just adores the humpy terrain and the lovely sand for tearing around like a grey-blue streak.

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the beach almost to ourselves is a pleasure beyond many, especially on a day when we are not being battered by an icy wind. I picked up a piece of mussel shell bright mauve from the wear of sand and wind and water, a very old and worn oyster shell with worm burrows accreted to its inside surface like old limestone carvings, and a piece of shell reduced to a lace sculpture by some unknown creature.

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walking back over the dunes I found the moss pushing itself up through the sand like little pustules. it reminded me a little of the wood ash and clay glaze when it crawls and opens up over porcelain.

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these little stretches of water surrounded by reedbed amongst the marsh grazing are protected from the wind by the high bank which keeps the sea out. they encourage waterfowl, and they bring that special light of sky reflected in water to a grey day.

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on the way home we passed through Cockthorpe especially to see the snowdrops in the churchyard there.

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the place is smothered in snowdrops, but the church tower looks in a bad state, with supports wrapping round it in several places. it is almost disused, and the parish is so tiny they will never have the money to get it repaired themselves.

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there are aconites amongst the snowdrops, and even violets, which smelt very sweet.
the violets are in the bottom right hand corner of this photo, but it has to be reduced down so much for the blog they are hardly visible.

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I always try to make a little pilgrimage to this church in february for the snowdrops.

beechcombings and sea poems

Posted jane -->on 26th Feb 2009

amongst my current reading two books by writers now living in Norfolk stand out; Beechcombings by Richard Mabey and Moored Man by Kevin Crossley-Holland – which is beautifully illustrated by Norman Akroyd with etchings and watercolours. this is a collection of poems about the spirit of that liminal place, the North Norfolk saltmarshes, embodied in a mythic figure with more than a touch of Grendel about him, Moored Man. (Crossley-Holland has a translation of Beowulf under his belt, illustrated by one of my all time favourites, Charles Keeping).

Ghost-Light

Under the Milky Way
his hidden lips and little throats
open, they stay open
as he sips and gurgles.

Under the dark, burning places
he spreads himself and plots himself.
Prone and accepting.

He strops his blades
under the red star.
Like nerves his wiry hairs quiver.

Under the wrenching moon
he is slats of ghost-light,
he is ribs and rising.
All he is, all he was
In this dream of re-becoming.

from Moored Man’s Tides

He faces the offing and world’s rim.
Home of the nightfall.

the mysterious quality of both text and image perfectly represent that place which cannot decide whether it is land or sea.

the welter; the rim;
the colours of separation;
always the ache of his tides
chiming
deep within.

Beechcombings is a far more matter of fact book, but it is still poetic; beech trees Mabey has known, and a wonderful assemblage of facts about them. much of it is about the landscape of southern England; the Chilterns, the New Forest, Felbrigg Hall here in Norfolk, or France – Fontainebleau Forest and the Barbizon School of painters. ‘the narratives of trees, the framings and images we make of them’, as Mabey puts it,  and ‘the trees’ own narratives, the stories they weave themselves in their migrations and distributions, in the groupings and patterns they form, even in their physical responses to being moulded by humans towards beauty in one direction and utility in the other.’

as a child I grew up with beeches just south of Norwich; my close-knit family  of grandparents and cousins lived with some wonderful gigantic beech trees, their huge roots exposed on the side of a steep bank. later in North Walsham our garden had a hollow beech tree in the centre of the garden, surrounded by a raised lawn made by its roots, and decorated with bracket fungus, in which lived a family of tawny owls. beech trees are not so common in Norfolk. the single specimen in the roadside hedges of Bale came down last spring, the lower part of its trunk all hollowed away by rot. it was a landmark, its branches all stretching away from the prevaling westerlies, like a head of hair streaming in the wind. there is one more, in the bridle way hedgerow, but it also has bracket fungus, so perhaps will not last much longer.

at Felbrigg Hall Mabey identifies the northern most beeches growing naturally in England. one pollard measuring seven point six metres in girth may be the biggest and possibly the oldest in Britain.  they are remnants of the wood-pasture that existed on Felbrigg Heath before three centuries of tree planting by the Wyndham dynasty.

the penultimate firing

Posted jane -->on 25th Feb 2009

at last I am beginning to fire the dishes so that they look how I want them. the black clay is still prone to sprawling but in this dish I am quite happy with the split and partial collapse.

a new title for the band of thicker glaze – on these horizontal pieces they begin to look like pathways, those in the saltmarsh which dry out into patterns of cracks in the summer, so instead of tidemarks, they have become tidepaths.

the new flasks with conical necks and round bodies which I have been making from press-moulded parts are proving a little awkward, in that the angle of the neck can become more exaggerated during the firing. the two in this firing emerged unaltered, and the barium glaze has matured nicely over the boring super-white stoneware. I have increased reduction on the last two firings, and it does help this glaze.

this is the only dish of this shape which has kept its original form so far, in my usual grey stoneware, but there are two more  in the terracotta crank in the next firing, which should be fine.

a weekend or so ago I bought an old butter patting paddle, just the thing for paddling my pots. this tall bottle with porcelain overlay shows its effect quite well.

and another little black pathway, or tidepath, flask.

the rest of the firing is here

second to last firing

Posted jane -->on 22nd Feb 2009

thank goodness the weather has let up, as I have been outside firing and glazing for several days, and it has been a pleasure. the garden is full of snowdrops now, and there is even a glimpse of crocus petal from within the tightly furled dark green points .

I unpacked a glaze firing this morning, and then repacked the kiln this afternoon. I’ll light it tonight, unpack on Wednesday and then the last firing for the Feast installation will be on Thursday. I can only get four of the dishes in each firing, then a few other taller pots in the other half of the kiln.

in the firing I opened today there were a lot of small bowls and spoons, but there are none of those left to fire now, so the next two will be more loosely packed.

these little bowls are very useful for filling up a kiln shelf next to one of the dishes. I probably won’t use them in  the Feast, but there are plenty of exhibitions for them to go in later this year.

the spoons are definitely for the Feast, but there will be plenty of spares.

the dishes are coming along, but I wouldn’t say  any of these four have quite come up to my expectations. this is the best of the batch.

still there are eight more, so I hope I will get better results. the black clay is still deforming; even though I used the very heavily grogged version this bowl “sat down” on the shelf a bit. these don’t have a foot ring, so it is not as much of a disaster. I suppose I should expect warping when its on the top shelf of the kiln. I finished before  cone eleven had bent more than a third, with this dish in mind. it has the barium glaze on it, so I wanted the glaze to mature fully.

all the dishes have the glaze overlap and it looks like a pathway, especially when the crawling is strengthened by the double application, as in this one which has the crawling shino. this dish had a crack already, but it has opened up in the firing.

I am finding out the hard way that these dishes must have nothing that risks their integral shape, no foot rings, no cracks or splits, because gravity combines with the fluxing of the clay in the firing and they warp, a lot.

another liability when using the black clay is that fragile joints just do not work. I have made some flasks with long conical necks and fat more or less spherical bodies.  one was a disaster – made of the black clay – the join between the body and the fragile neck could not cope and it came apart. the other was made more sturdily, in my standard grogged grey stoneware mix, and survived.

this just happens to have a flange as well, but that probably would not have made a difference to the black one. I have four more of these to fire.

this is my favourite pieces from the firing. its the first time I have double dipped one of these shapes vertically and I am very pleased with the result. annoyingly it is often the smallest pieces which work the best.

the other favourite piece is this little pinch pot, hastily made as an afterthought, and put in the glaze firing raw, of St Thomas reduction clay mixed with the subsoil from my finca in Extremadura. the grit, mica and feldspar, contrary to my expectations of the piece blowing up and covering everything else with the detrius, have fluxed nicely leaving the feldspar as rounded white nodules on the surface.

I will be mixing up some clay with this in a less concentrated form when I get the time. meanwhile two more firings to go!

the photos of the pots are here

new collection

Posted jane -->on 11th Feb 2009

part of the reason I couldn’t blog the firing last week, was that we photographed the knit collection on Saturday. Sid was up from London, briefly, as usual, and, as usual for the February shoot, it was a lovely sunny, but very cold morning. we used my neighbours’ old forge, which has just had the builders in preparatory to turning it into a kitchen/living room, so there is bare render and plaster, new roof-lights, and cables hanging out of walls which are rough limewashed cobble anyway. an interesting rustic and raw dynamic. lots of light, a lot of sunlight, which had to be avoided, but I am quite pleased with some of the photos. this is my favourite.

the cables look like some mad sculptural addition to the hat and the whole composition makes an off-balance swirl. we turned the hat inside out to make it do this and you can actually see the label, unfortunately.

here is another mad big hat. I wanted my hats to be bigger than last season. this yarn is even called Big Wool. its very light and is knitted on almost the biggest size needle you can buy, 15mm. I think Sid looks charming in this.

this is the same hat, just worn differently. the cardigan has the olive tree embroidery design I did from drawings done in Extremadura, with birds and olives on the branches. designing the collection away from home really paid off I think, I had plenty of time and no distractions. I don’t think I could have done as much in as short a time at home.

this is the moonlit night embroidery with sequins, over a traditional shetland lace stitch of trees. so it is the rays of the full moon shining down over my olive grove! well, that’s how I think of it, anyway. it is on the hat too.

this one is frosty morning embroidery with sequins over another traditional shetland lace stitch, called pearie flea . and yes, you can guess the inspiration. this collection has the month I spent in Extremadura as a major preoccupation, obviously.

this one is called sprinkle. a sprinkle of sequins over the shoulders of a cardigan in either one of the lace patterns. simple and pretty. you can see the other sixty six photos here

frost crystals

Posted jane -->on 10th Feb 2009

february alternates between sharp frosts, wet snow and heavy rain, here near the North Sea coast. so far at least we have escaped the heaviest snow falls, but the lanes are lethal with black ice some mornings. the birds seem to think it’s spring already; the thrush trying out the new season’s songs at the top of his tree; the woodpecker is drumming on sunny mornings; the robin is singing, and the wood pigeons are cooing already. strange to hear such a summery sound when sawing up wood of a frosty morning for the wood stove. I seem to spend as much time sawing as making pots.

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icy puddles have strange angular structures, frozen solid.

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pheasant and deer tracks are frozen into the mud, and in this corner the sun can hardly melt the frost.

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I always love leaves bejewelled by the hoar frost.

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this beaker also bears the marks of the frost. I was glazing pots on a freezing cold Sunday, and I put it into the kiln straight away after glazing it. then I left the kiln open for a couple of days as I hadn’t got enough pieces to fill it at that point. the glaze on the beaker froze, and then dried. I have three beakers like this. a nice bit of serendipity.

I opened the kiln on Friday 6th February, but this is the first moment I’ve had to update the blog. I was very disappointed with some of the pieces I had made in the super white stoneware. its a very boring clay, rather smooth and full of molochite, which is a grog made of porcelain. but its easy to work with and I have a lot of it. usually I use it as a top layer, with a crank under, which gives it more interest. it seems that it is not so good with the shino glaze as the coarser white clays, or even porcelain.

however, looking at them more closely, I am finding more subtle interest in the way the glaze surface is starting to break up. I made four beakers in it and raw glazed them with the shino. they went in last, next to the flame on the top shelf.

the little stars of surface disruption are rather pleasing. the surfaces of other three have opened up into slits, and the clay underneath is stained orange by salt in the glaze. but one of the dishes had shed the thickest part of the shino; it was hanging off in frozen sheets. the small bowls are fine.

the black clay, even though it was on the bottom shelf, still distorted so that this bowl sat down on one side. you can’t see it in the photo. I have decided to make bowls and dishes with no feet for the installation; it makes them more plate-like, and saves this bother of the bowl sitting down over the foot ring.

however I think the black clay works really well with the wood ash and clay glaze, and I will be enthusiastically using the black clay with this and the barium glaze for several of the installation pieces.

here is the barium glaze on a beaker in the black clay. the purplish/pinkish cast is due to the oxides in the clay. I am very pleased with it.

the rest of the firing is here