Soda wood firing
The big excitement over the past few days has been the soda wood firing I did at the weekend.
Because the test results from the soda firing a couple of weeks ago were so beautiful, I decided to put some pieces into the next one. Then, when I was selected for the HOUSE Open exhibition at the Regency Town House exhibition during the Brighton Festival, it all fell into place. I decided to make two wall pieces using the same forms, in effect creating double the amount of work, one glazed with a selection of glazes I developed last summer when I was here and the other with the new soda fired pieces. So I will be exhibiting two versions of the same work simultaneously, one at The Ceramic House at the other in one of the main exhibition venues in central Brighton, which is perfect because each will advertise the other and will hopefully attract more audience to both.
Then, I plan to blend the two pieces into one very large installation that will be exhibited in Rønne Library in Bornholm during European Ceramic Context from September to November.
So that is why I have been working very hard indeed slip casting non stop for days on end, because I suddenly had to make twice the quantity of pieces I had originally planned.
Last week I put two more bisque firings on, only one of which came out in time for the soda firing, which means I am missing a few pieces for that version, but it will be different anyway. The third bisque kiln had an electrical fault during the firing, and we couldn’t tell how high it had fired to. It ended up very under-fired and therefore very fragile – more than a few of my pieces fell apart in my hands.
Friday we started loading up the soda kiln. It’s a beast of a thing, charred, blackened, sooty and huge. I was sharing the firing with Christian Bruun, a Copenhagen-based potter who comes to Guldagergård to use the soda kiln. It’s a science I do not understand, soda firing, so I left it up to the experts to plan all the packing and firing schedules.
Essentially, it’s a wood firing, and the fire is started up slowly, building up the temperature until it reaches around 1300º, and then soda crystals are fed into the kiln chamber up to 12 times, allowing the soda to evaporate and form a glaze together with the ash from the wood on to the surface of the ceramics. Then after all that, the kiln is “down-fired”, which means controlling the lowering of the temperature, which increases the colours in the glazes and clay bodies. It consumes a lot of wood!And requires a lot of patience and watching. But we were blessed with lovely weather and Christian wanted to take the night shift, which meant I had three shifts daytime and evening. The whole thing took 31 hours, starting at 10am on Saturday morning and finishing around 5pm on Sunday. It’s a lot different to simply filling an electric kiln and turning it on and then coming back 2 or 3 days later to open it up.
For now we have to wait until Thursday this week to see what the results are… I am so curious! And it is so interesting that before I came I would have sworn I will never do wood firings, because I was not convinced and did not understand what extraordinary colours and textures can be achieved. And that is what inspires me above all in my work: colour and texture. So it’s plain to see how beneficial coming on residencies like this is – new things happen and grow and turn everything around. Which is great.
