back to the pot shed for the first time for months and I have been picking up the oak leaves I have been so enchanted by to impress into clay. porcelain is the best material for retaining and showing off an impression – to start with I have been layering porcelain into stoneware clays – I do like the contrasts I get with this technique, and the extra depth of all the edges.
not all leaves – here is one that has been attacked by the spaghetti spoon.
the remnants of the cut out ovals make shapes which demand to be attached as wings, or flanges.
today I worked with just the porcelain, rolling it out on a board contaminated with stoneware, iron bearing clays – this will give me some mottling and interesting variations under the glazes. I have a shaped piece of wood with a slot and holes in it, which works well as a repeated shape. a very small acorn still in its cup makes the round shapes, with more oak leaves as a border.
I am listening to the Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a hard sci-fi novel – which is almost an inspiration, with its convoluted plot and descriptions of strange spaceships and habitats, exo-memories and many other weird goings on.
constructing a sci-fi bottle …
there’s my ipod telling me stories on the bench …. a tall slim cylindrical bottle
and a one-winged vessel …..
the short afternoons limit my making, it starts to get dark after three, and I leave the rest of the porcelain wrapped for tomorrow.
I returned to Moreno León in Torrejoncillo, Extremadura, three weeks ago, to see my tinaja, and my dear friends Antonio, Rafa and Carlos the tinajareros, and was lucky enough to arrive on a friday afternoon when they were in the middle of loading their huge kiln.
the kiln is the one place they can’t use the jack trolleys and the huge pots, not yet fired and quite delicate, have to be manoeuvred by hand. also the kiln is lined with ceramic insulating fibre which is dangerous to breathe in, so masks are the order of the day.
the big dark jar on the right is one of four commissioned for a garden in Madrid – this will be spectacular!
they have started using manganese oxide to give an aged appearance, which I think works quite well. we also saw a large ridged jar treated with a white slip in their Caceres shop which looked very impressive.
but the orange terracotta au naturel is very beautiful.
they have a collection of old pieces for sale in the storeroom. Jimenez was the potter in Arroyomolinas de Montanchez. this cono is as tall as me. “FABRICADE JUAN PEDRO JIMENEZ AÑO 1944″
In the local bodega where I bought wine they have this sort of thing, not used any more, but kept for interests sake.
I love this; the shape is gorgeous, and the surface bears all the marks of its making and its age.
old and new
this is a beauty too. I hope to buy some old pieces to keep in Spain.
they can keep my jar company.
double signature; the six-sided star, the star of David, is Moreno León’s stamp and indicates a very old origin .. possibly Catholic converts who stayed in Spain after the Jews were expelled.
a week in Paris at the beginning of October for the showroom at Philippe Model. it was amazingly hot and sunny, and felt like a holiday in the south.
parisian market stalls sell beautiful fruit. mangoes are my breakfast treat when I am there.
pollen from my flowers on this lovely crackled platter.
Philippe is collecting my pots. one is in a photo in his book about using colour in interiors “Les Couleurs” – as is this mantelpiece.
this metallic knit hat is an old favourite, and blends in very well with the aged mirror, the faux shabby subtle stripes and the hat head (which is polystyrene with papier-maché and paint layered on). the pillbox hat is Philippe’s favourite (he is a hat designer amongst many other things).
here we are. next door there were three designers sharing a room. Kyoko is a japanese bag designer from London, and Aki makes plastic, very modern, jewellery. Hut Up is a felt designer from Berlin, Christine Birkle. you can see her website here. we will probably share this huge space next season. I only had it through enormous luck – the previous occupant cancelled, and the room could not be booked to anyone else in time, so Philippe suggested I took it instead of my tiny attic room. what a blessing! I would have suffered terribly from the heat in that tiny low-ceilinged south facing room. this room has two huge windows facing east into the courtyard, breezy, high ceilinged, and hardly any sunshine coming in. one of the coolest rooms in the house, I think. I didn’t need to use the lights until the last day, which helped to keep the temperature down.
it has panelling painted in whatever colours monsieur Philippe is experimenting with currently.
I was worried that my small collection would look a bit thin in such a large space, but it seemed to work. everybody was very complimentary, and I did a lot better than for the last few spring seasons. this is partly an ongoing trend anyway, but I am sure it would have been very difficult to take any orders in temperatures of thirty five plus.
I brought this beautiful patchwork blanket assembled by my assistant Sue Harper with infinite care and patience from old swatches, mostly cashmere. normally it is on my bed, but I thought it would help to dress the space.
pigeon pie came along. the panels are treated with some mysterious effect using chalk so the deep pink in this part of the room is permanent.
in the kitchen the northern light is cool and translucent. the windows in this house which is used for photographing interiors so much are never cleaned. the dust forms an opaque screen so that the view is always obscured.
a funny little teapot arrangement in this eclectic room, which is our common room as well as the hub of the house. hospitable breakfasts, sociable lunches, and many cups of tea and coffee.
Philippe’s collection of objects includes this watering can which of course drew my camera’s eye.
the classic Parisian court. during the first five days it became very mediterranean with the sun blasting in, but on this last day cloud cover kept it grey.
and the view from the windows of the new room (the ante-chamber). I am very lucky to be able to show my collection here, in company with other european designers, plus one japanese designer from Sydney, Akira, and one italian from New York, Matta. we are always sad to pack up and leave.
autumn started in July this year; september can be kind, but not this year, not so far .. in the intervals between rain and wind I can sit and read in a sheltered spot in the garden.
some of the hedgerow field maples are full of these pretty pink and green helicopter seeds and the oak trees are full of acorns.
my garden still has plenty of colour and greenery – it has been a good growing season.
the brick paving has been invaded on all sides by weeds – some creeping and some very bold.
the wild garden has its own colour and pattern to delight the eye
fennel seeds catch the evening light
and bedstraw is full of black seeds
knapweed brown and straggling – soon to be scythed down
poppies still flowering, but the seed heads, delicate and sculptural, wait to be gathered for next years show.
in my workshop a stasis …..
bisque-fired pots wait for decisions. I just had a huge edit and need inspiration for new things to do with these pieces.
the biggest are the least problem … a cone 9/10 firing, monochrome, near-blacks and near-whites, soon.
and the apple tree has branches so weighed down they are near being broken by the weight.
this firing was full temperature – cone 10/11 – and I needed those blues, greens and oranges, so a less heavy reduction than the last one. there were a couple of re-fires from that firing too – the grey unlovely under-fired piece, and the blue bowl …
after 1100 C no flame, but a desirable amount of reduction indicated by the black smoke drifting out of the side of the flue.
it seems to have done the trick at first glance, although the bowls at the bottom left are rather under-fired – I suspected they would be, tucked away down there. ominous cracking noises turned out to be from the big pot at the front, which split open when I took it out. the pyrometer said 80 C before I opened it – I suppose this was a little hot. next time perhaps I’ll leave it another day to cool. the top part of this pot is rather thin, and as it is made of two layers of clay, a white stoneware full of molochite over a well grogged buff stoneware, I presume that put some strain on it as well. shame, the glaze was rather good.
in fact the firing was perfect, except for those two small bowls, which included the re-fire small blue bowl. the blues and oranges are beautifully clear, the black clay mixed with buff stoneware, glazed with barium carbonate and china clay, seated on sand to stop them sticking to the shelves, behaved this time, no cracking.
the “saltwater” glaze, a version of the dolomite/copper glaze with much less copper and a little bit of cobalt, was the star of this firing. especially this pot, one of those messily layered with sticky porcelain slip and china clay powder. perfect mixture of crusty and intense colour.
a simple little piece, but one of my favourites, the glaze becomes blue over the thin porcelain layer on the outside, and brown on the buff stoneware inside.
I refired this one – the unlovely grey – and it has become much more interesting, and warmer. over reduction and under-firing made it cold.
this large coiled bowl had black iron oxide painted on the inside, which gives a rather luscious rust colour under the copper/dolomite glaze.
another little treasure from the saltwater glaze, with the rust accretion ash glaze on the bottom and overlapping. this is one of those with porcelain layering over a dark buff stoneware, which is almost metallic where it shows. the contaminated porcelain gives a sort of robin’s egg blue, speckled greeny-blue.
two bowls were right at the bottom of the kiln, but next to the burner, so they got enough heat. these small bowls are pressed and beaten over a mould and then pinched into shape.
I found a bin of an old shino which I had stopped using ages ago, and tried it in February. it does some quite interesting things over dark clays, so I tried it on the black – it is glossier than it looks here, but the different shades and the pitting are quite pleasing, I think.
I feel I have found two ways of firing – one with less reduction to cone 10/11 as here – and the lower temperature heavy reduction firing, which gives me more monochromes. I like both and will continue to work both ways. the rest of the firing can be seen here
back to glaze firing with a stack of biscuit pots to experiment on. this time I tried to recreate something which happened five years ago. of course it didn’t work exactly, but I got some interesting pots. I used my old magnesium crawling glaze, which has a wonderful matt marble surface, sometimes it heals up again after crawling, resulting in a network of slightly shiny veining. it needs a lower temperature, between cones nine and ten, and different parts of the kiln do different things to it. it also needs a very smoky intense reduction all the way from 1050 to about 1230 Centigrade. with heavy reduction cone nine will go over at about that temperature.
I first dipped this pot head first into the barium glaze, which I had thinned down rather a lot. putting another glaze over it if it is thick is a risky business as it can just all peel off almost straight away. then the overlapping layer is the magnesium glaze. it was very near the gas burner, so parts have really over-melted; it is not what I expected, but I still think it works.
this jar has one coat of the magnesium glaze. the clay is white stoneware with an impure fire-brick grog, and the impurities give these black markings. it is slightly under-fired, it was on the floor of the kiln, but it has come out a good reduced dry matt grey-white, and the crawl is a little rough textured.
this big bottle (47 cm) has the layering like the first and I am very pleased; I think it is the best pot of the firing. it was next to the flue, which is a hot spot in my kiln. the other side of it has less melt, more crawl. also the barium glaze has produced a good colour and texture with the heavy reduction. it leaves the clay a rusty buff, where the crawl has pulled the glaze away, even though this is a white stoneware.
this pot has a layer of porcelain over a medium buff stoneware, so the magnesium glaze is a little different. the crawl lines are interesting.
the rest have variously reacted to the lower firing – in fact it was slightly lower than I intended, cone 9 didn’t bend right over; I couldn’t draw out the spyhole brick, it had got chipped and the chip made it stick, I had to look through the little plughole in it. the barium glaze doesn’t seem to mind at all, it works fine on the top shelf or on the floor of the kiln.
this is my blue dolomite glaze over china clay slip, and it could have done with a less smoky firing, the blue would have been clearer.
again, the barium glaze, absolutely fine, doing what I intended – lovely crusty surfaces over the sticky porcelain slip and powdered china clay.
this is the blue glaze again and it IS really under-fired – I will re-fire.
another experiment, manganese oxide painted on to the raw clay and scratched off again in parts, then the blue glaze over it. it was a good thing this was fired at a lower temperature, the oxide did make the glaze run slightly on part of this. I like the metallic blue. I will have to try less oxide and more scratching off.
I got several of these crusty little bottles
and the black clay that I cut with buff stoneware – about the same and more stable, so that was a useful process, and it saved on expensive clay too. there are quite a few more of these to fire, I will have to try some other glazes on them.
so – various paths up which I hope to explore further. the whole firing can be seen here
summer should be the best time for making pots, but when the weather is good the three huge pieces of double glazing in the pot shed roof make it a little hot. however I can’t complain about that much this summer.
the lilies are just starting to open their buds; I have been vigilant against the lily beetles and there are four pots of healthy plants.
the last batch of pots which should fill the kiln for a second biscuit firing; stage one – I have plastered semi-liquid china clay on the surfaces which blends in an interesting way with the mess made by brown slip when joining, with a few finger prints added. my glazes really like this mix.
ready for the spout after a good slapping ….
four little bottles with shoulders. I had already been looking at Cycladic sculpture, which is where this spade silhouette shape came from, but a friend gave me a book on it, with some great images. the marble bowls and containers have wonderful texture, rough powdery surfaces, and craggy edges …
so I have gone back to making some bowls – these are cut out of the rolled out clay as discs, then put over a mould and paddled into a rough bowl shape, then pinched and generally squished upwards and inwards as much as the clay will stand (this is recycled for about the third time, so it doesn’t stand up to a lot).
another one with porcelain slip daubed over it. you can just see a vase with manganese oxide and sgraffito marks lurking in the corner.
then this bigger shallow bowl with a lot of china clay powder sprinkled onto wet porcelain slip
more finished pieces waiting to go into the kiln
already biscuit fired; painted with black iron oxide and scored;
this one painted with manganese – I have no idea what these oxides are going to do under my glazes – I just hope they don’t end up melting all over the kiln shelves.
I made a whole batch of these in a mix of the black clay and a dark stoneware to replace the big black bottle which cracked in the last firing. hopefully the mixture will give these a better chance.
I want to dedicate this post to my old friend Max Bell (not his real name) who sometimes commented here and was always encouraging. I was very sad to hear he died this weekend, after a long battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. far too young and with too much to do to go out like that.
five days of speaking Spanish in an all male working environment with Antonio, Raphael, and Carlos, the three brothers at Moreno Leon in Torrejoncillo – one of the few remaining makers of traditional Spanish terracotta storage jars – tinajas. a privilege, an utter indulgence of me on their part, and a fantastic inside view of something that almost died out in the UK with Isaac Button, the last traditional English potter.
the telephone, plastered with clay, next to Rafa’s wheel, jammed between ear and shoulder while he throws or coils – an indispensable part of running a modern business which is not usually given access to a British studio potter’s workshop.
the workshop is half of a huge L-shaped barn-like structure; the other half houses the kiln, this container-sized green metal box, gas fired, computer-controlled, which replaces the open top updraught wood fired kiln the family were using even in 1989, when photos were taken for the book, la tinajeria tradicional en la cerámica española. Antonio told me they would use encina, evergreen oak, and finish the firing with gum cistus, jara, the incense scented shrub of the extremaduran maquis. the smell was wonderful, he said, with no real nostalgia for a laborious process. the back of this space is given over to clay preparation and storage, something I did not investigate, due to lack of time, and not wanting to disrupt their workday. the clay is local, from land they own about 3 km from the pueblo.
moreno leon goes back seven generations in the family to the first whose name is known, in the late eighteenth century, but probably well before that. Spain used to be dotted with tanajerias, every pueblo with a usable clay source would be making storage jars for keeping wine and oil, probably since the Romans; now this is the only one in our province, Caceres.
the jars are made with a combination of throwing and coiling methods; the bases all thrown on these low electric wheels, then coils added, and tidied up on the wheel. the pots are trundled about on jack trolleys, and take about 4 days to make, depending on size, being allowed to stiffen up naturally in between steps.
I was given a thrown base to start coiling on
but my pot, a cono, the straight sided typical extremaduran household jar, stayed off the wheel after that.
Antonio sneaked some photos without my being aware; this taken across the lip, the boca, of the piece he was working on. compare the beautiful regular coil he has attached, to the raggedy edges of mine …..
Carlos is the real coiling specialist.
here he is adding a coil. looks easy, doesn’t it!
two kinds of really big pot – this big-bellied shape
which they make with the deep ridges too (surcos)
and the big conos.
third day; before continuing to coil the outside is scraped and smoothed with a piece of bamboo, then paddled with the ping-pong bat-shaped wooden paddle – there are at least three different shapes, concave, convex, and flat, beautiful objects in their own right. I worked from four in the afternoon until eight in the evening every day (their working day is eight to eight, with two hours for lunch) and the pot was left uncovered in between, which allowed just the right amount of drying.
portrait of Carlos, by Antonio.
smaller tinajas with surcos, native to Galicia.
fourth day; scraped, smoothed and paddled.
now I have a platform to stand on. it is meant for the huge ali-baba jars, so I have to watch my feet.
fifth day; ready for the lip and the bung.
I got the lip on, with no wheel, after considerable trouble, fussing, and fiddling. Antonio showed me how, but I don’t have his experience and skill, of course.
the bung hole goes on in a similar way. I am so envious sometimes of the dexterity of potters who have been handling clay for a lifetime.
Antonio working on a set of short conos; he explained that if it is done right there will be no drip of wine or oil to waste or make a mess.
a combined signature to finish. my spiraling decoration allows a camino for the ants, I was told reproachfully.
and here we are, Antonio, Carlos, the cono, and the apprentice tinajera.
I packed seven of the big pots into the kiln on Thursday, trying to make plenty of space between them for the heat to move around. Perhaps there were too many in there – none of them were more than an inch short of the roof, and some just about touching. the firing certainly went differently. I had noticed that when I bisque fired them the kiln seemed a little slow, and the firing was quite uneven, as the black clay had started to go black near the top of the pot. the glaze firing was very awkward – with the flue as closed and the pressure as low as I had it on the last two firings at 1030 C the temperature stuck and even went down. in the end more pressure and a wider opening to the flue worked better, but I found that I needed to lose the visible signs of reduction to get the temperature to rise quite frequently. the firing took longer – about two hours longer.
in fact the amount of reduction was fine, and I was very pleased with all the pots, except that the black clay large bottle with wirebrush vertical scoring, on which I used the barium carbonate glaze, cracked right open across the base.
the crack ran right up the front of the pot and opened it up across the shoulder seam, which broke off half the neck as well. this is quite a disappointment. I think the clay of the base melted into the kiln shelf slightly, which prevented the pot shrinking as it cooled. I will have to put any big pots like this on the shelf with either clay supports or pieces of kiln brick under them in future.
you can see the dark rings made by the two black clay bottles, and a dust track from the snap right across where it broke.
the crawling shino worked really well on the other black clay piece.
the dolomite/tin copper glaze behaved as it has been doing for the past couple of firings, where I have dipped in and out with no hanging about and got a thin coating. on the pale stoneware the coppery ginger is breaking where the surface of the clay is disturbed on this side of the pot, which was close to the front of the kiln, but on the other side it is all over rather than just on the scored lines.
I overlapped the two dolomite glazes, the green/orange, and the blue/grey in these two bottles, which were both at the front of the kiln. this is the st thomas reduction clay, which gets quite toasty and makes the glazes darker. I picked this section of the pot for a close-up to show off my scored lines.
on the photos of the whole pot it’s hard to see the blue of this glaze where it breaks, but in real life it is quite noticeable. I’m very pleased with it, a blue that is just green enough.
this is a reprise of what I did in the summer with porcelain; plastered gooey porcelain over the surface of a buff stoneware, sprinkled it with china clay powder and rolled it in, before making the pot, and then glazed with barium carbonate.
here is the dolomite/tin/copper glaze doing something completely different – it is over a very white stoneware full of molochite grog, on very thin, and in the middle of the kiln. a gorgeous pumpkin orange, where over the edge of the buff underneath, it is just brown.
apart from the sad state of the big black bottle, a very pleasing firing. you can see the pots here
after the rain, spring is here today. the sun on my back was almost hot.
in the garden the birds are busy; goldfinches whistling and zzzzing; the thrush muttering his subsong from the ivy in the sycamore; the bluetits are having a go at enlarging the entrance hole in the tit box – they do it every year, I don’t know why but I can hear the tap tap as one of them pecks away at it.
I am preparing pots and the kiln for glazing.
the hellebores seem happy with their mulching and exhibit masses of big juicy flowers. more crocuses keep appearing out of the mulch; satiny purple and sunshine orange.
the ditches at the bottom of Blood Hill are full of snowdrops too.
walking along the woodshore hazel catkins dangle like fuzzy pale green raindrops blurred by slow exposure.
yesterday’s rain still gathers on every twig. the ponds in the wood are full of water, the ditches slimy with decomposed leaves.
the beech tree, iron grey with all her limbs reaching up between the ash and the oak.
a thrush sings from deep in the wood. new buds are opening into leaf on the honeysuckle, and the primrose crowns are full of tight new leaves. buzzards call to each other overhead.
in the mud rucked up by the shepherd’s land-rover there are muntjac hoofprints. larks sing above the big field that rises alongside the lane.
two early primroses in flower already where the hedge sides have been cleared; there will be a good show of them this year.
the big pots are quite awkward to glaze; I splash my feet and the floor filling them with the liner glaze and pouring it out again. the blue glaze is in too small a bin and it overflows – I continue to push down – too late to do anything else. glazing has to be done in one fell swoop, and outdoors.
