In-class demo, unfired clay turtle, fish, cup

 

Salt fired burnished collapsed pot, 5 x 5”

For a short while, we had access to a salt-fire kiln, always tricky in a school setting, because the fumes are extremely toxic. This was a collapsed pot that I turned into a Georgia O’Keeffe style sculpture, the only surviving salt-fire piece I made.

Fat Kate, lowfire ceramic sculpture, iron stain, approx. 1 x 1'

Almost none of my ceramics survived the onslaught of years, petty thefts, and many moves. And of course the unthinkable—my portfolio slides were destroyed. So imagine my surprise when I uncovered this piece from beneath some ivy in my grandmother's garden. Fat Kate had been buried for more than 30 years. Made ca. 1972 or 73. I need to clean it up, and take detail shots. Added 8/21.

 

3" pinch pot, glaze test, oxblood ca. 1973

Terrible photos but I managed to make an oxblood glaze.

Metal and rutile (blue) breaks like jewels.

 

I recently found the pot & the rutile blue disappeared

Pinch pots and glaze tests, ca.1973-76

All these pot fragments (along with sculpture of Fat Kate) were buried for 50 years beneath 2 feet of dirt between two dead cedars at my grandmother’s place. Talk about an unexpected archaeological find. Once a pot garden. Most of the pots were broken via time. It’s true, Thano Johnson said the bad pots tend to survive unscathed (teapot with my borate glaze was for our final. The lid had to fit, and it had to pour without dripping.) The ones with smoked black bottoms and blue and green streaks were raku pots, so the green glaze would’ve been metalic—copper-colored. It’s long since oxidized. I made many gourd pots for a raku class. Tiny pricked design pinch pot (one of three) was fired in our fireplace. Talk about oxidized low fire pots. They said it couldn’t be done. But I proved them wrong. You can indeed low fire a pot without a kiln. I was reinventing the archaeological wheel. One of the pots did not break, but the others did, as the walls were very thin. I did other tests with glazes, but glaze didn’t vitrify in a fireplace. Goblet was a high-fire test pot for cobalt and iron ash glazes (from our fireplace) I was working on. The pulled handles were a Thano trademark. He was a student of Soji Hamada, and had a Fullbright to study Korean peasant pottery.

 

 

Raku pots, ca. 1973-76

 Most of these raku parts were based upon ancient Chinese bronze pots, so they stood on little legs and because they were raku pots they were also fragile. Most of the best ones broke early on and lost their metallic luster. What amazes me is that these pots survived being buried for decades in the garden, and some of them still retained their glaze luster. The ones that turned green, were once the color of a bright copper penny. Another thing that amazes me is the iron oxide made gray metallic streaks, and the blue and orange colors I can’t remember what I did glaze-wise, cobalt, and?, but they were all glaze experiments and I was pushing the art form as far as I could. I used rice hulls to smoke the pots and reduce the glaze. Sometimes I got lucky with those red streaks, kind of rare. The thin-walled puts did not survive the travesty of time, but the clunkers did. I was an in different wheel Potter, I was more adept at hand-building, probably because in high school we girls weren’t allowed to straddle a wheel as it was considered too suggestive for the boys. The little horned container may have been made by Bob Hamilton, but we were both making so many pots, sometimes we couldn’t tell whose was whose. But it shows the whimsey we were playing with.

This pot is unglazed, I burnished it with a smooth stone.

Raku mask, North Wind, shell and copper inlay, ca. 1973, 1 x 2’

Left side of hair is missing, remarkable as it hung outside 40 years

Hair was a copper luster glaze, eyes & earrings, inlaid copper wire. 

Thano Johnson said the piece wouldn't survive a raku firing. It's the only piece that has survived all these years. Outside, at that. Some of the hair broke off near the ear. I had a fever that day the piece was due, I was delirious and all I wanted was to cool off. So I channeled the north wind.

Serving platter 1.5', temmoku & ash glazes over slip, ca. 1974-75

Ironically, when I picked this platter up in order to take a photo of it, it broke along the foot where I had trimmed it too thin. It survived all these years only to break when I picked it up with too many heavy tools in it.

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I picked up the tool-filled bowl by the rim & it broke some 40 years later.

5” high fire clay stoneware pot, temmoku glaze, ca. 1973

homemade temmoku oak ash glaze with iron furring

temmoku glaze, iron furring, ash/rutile glaze inside

Since almost none of my clay pieces from this period survived, and I have no archived photos, this is a placeholder. I made a lot of pots, platters, bowls, teapots, and raku sculptures during my three years at College of Marin with Thano Johnson, who was a student of Sōji Hamada. We apprenticed from the ground up, finding and digging clay, refining it, finding the right cone temperature to fire it, measuring shrinkage, to mixing glazes, they had to be the right kind for the type of clay body—to making our own glazes from scratch—I made my own oak ash glazes from our iron fireplace. We had raku parties at Waddell Beach with the famous potters. I have one mask that survived. 

Glaze test bowl, rutile, and temoku iron glaze