Rocks have Lids?

Rocks have Lids?

ByJoseph Travis

Or how something I created due to injury became of of my favourite ceramic creations. In 2018 I was preparing for Earth and Fire in Nottinghamshire and working as a Design Technology Technician (wood, metal and plastics) as a day job, I was using a bandsaw which was something I did most days as I was generally using the laser cutter and supervising classes at the same time. Our bandsaw wasn’t the best, it was in all likelihood bought by the school long before I was born and it was in constant need of TLC. Regardless, as I made a…

Saggar Fired Pottery

ByJoseph Travis

For the last year I have been experimenting with firing inside a saggar inside my electric kiln.  From the start I have to say anything fired in this method I wouldn’t sell as food safe and to make certain of that I don’t make functional ware with this method, just things that are purely sculptural, albeit quite small sculptures. So what’s a saggar and what does it do? A saggar is a sacrificial pot that was originally used in industry to keep ceramic glaze free from ash during the firings, especially with coal as this can make the wares quite…

Recent Tiles

ByJoseph Travis

For a while I have been thinking about tiles as an act of experimentation, they are something that can be created in the fraction of time for throwing, there is a lot less focus that goes into creating them, no hunching over the wheel.  In some ways they are quite disposable. I don’t generally use tile for glaze tests as they don’t have gravity and thickness’s similar to pots but I do use them to test ideas, patterns, new  and more recently my saggars to see what effects are possible.  In these sorts of ways the tiles are part of…

More Saggars

ByJoseph Travis

So this week I made some prototype saggar formers and saggars, I mixed my own clay with sawdust, grog from broken pots and some molochite for added strength.  Now if I didn’t have a deadline I would let them dry over two weeks, but I had a deadline so I force dried overnight and fired the next day so you will see some cracks in the larger saggar. Also if you want to make a saggar former don’t leave such big gaps as the clay can get stuck in them making the harder to remove.

What’s in the Saggar?

ByJoseph Travis

For the uninitiated, I should explain what a Saggar is, it is a big piece of pottery that smaller pottery is sealed in.  Traditionally this was done in Stoke on Trent to protect the pottery from the coal fire that they fired their kilns with. Modern Potters use them to get a reduction environment inside an electric kiln, this stops the kiln from getting damaged and brings some different effects to the pots. I threw a a saggar a few years ago and it has been sat on the top shelf on my studio for a few years now, not…