I make these saggars on the wheel but I have also made them using formers in the past. Using formers means rolling out slaps rather than wrestling large amounts of clay into one place. I made one recently that was the size of my kiln interior by wrapping clay slabs around a bucket wrapped in paper.
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.
Last time I wrote about the importance of a narrow focus, I considered writing this one about having a broad focus. I changed my mind when I remembered Michael Kline’s post “play the Pro” which was about how we are all hobbyists at times. Michael has been playing around with slip inlay, and spent quite some time with the work under wraps until he felt more confident with it. But this playfulness in the working process brings a level of joy. Having closed down Red Fox Pottery in 2012 I stepped away from clay to become an art teacher. Teacher…
One of the advantages of going back to a form of making I haven’t used much and I am not comfortable with gives me fresh insights into the making process, for me hand building is something I never really pushed on with like I did with throwing. Each part of the hand building process has its own rhythm; it doesn’t matter how fast or slow. What is more important keeping a steady rhythm, rhythm improves the flow of making, in fact trying to go fast and misplacing hands can cause the mind to pause and wonder what it is you…
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…
I didn’t know it at the time but James Hake gave the best advice to me when as an art student and I told him I wanted to be a Potter. His advice was simply that you should start off small, making only a small variety of objects, at most five or six. Those objects should be developed to the highest quality you can make before adding more objects to the range. I have to admit I didn’t listen having a whole shop to fill and I was too busy listening to the voices of potential customers, make this make…
“Better to put Spirit into the Materials” -Jacques Kauffman This last weekend I travelled to Scotland and back to be part of a friend’s wood and soda kiln firing. The journey was a long one taking me 12 hours for the return trip, so I went well armed with a sketchbook and an iPod loaded with my two favourite podcasts The Potters Cast and Tales of a Red Clay Rambler. As I travelled I listened to the podcasts and sketched what I saw out of the window. It was a pleasant way to travel alone to somewhere I have never…
