It’s been a busy week at work and a slow week in any art or architecture related news, at least via my sources, so I thought I’d share a photo of the workbench today, scrapped together with cameraphone images:

Click on the image for a little more detail.

The cloud forms are actually from a successful firing last weekend. The low swoopy form has a hairline crack in the narrow edge, but I think I can live with that at this stage in my aspiring artist game. Another cloud, not in the photo, cracked badly enough that I won’t use it for a finished product (I didn’t like that one anyway), but will probably experiment with finishes upon its surface. I didn’t apply terra sig to these, unfortunately, so I’m not sure they’ll take smoke very well.

The wood laying around on the bench — scraps from around the studio being laminated together — will turn into the prairies under the storms. I did some sketching from the plane on my recent flight to California as inspiration for these flatter surfaces. The intersections and geometry of fields and pivot irrigation with rivers and forests bears a lot of visual interest.

Oh, and if you saw some off the wall entry from TAE in your feed reader last night just ignore it. I was playing around with something and hit publish when I shouldn’t have.

Glazes that are more or less useless in functional ceramics can do wonderful things for sculptural clay pieces. With this in mind, I’m game for trying some pretty strange things. This isn’t uncommon in the clay world anyway, where my college professors encouraged us with stories of their own experimentation. The one I remember in particular was a pizza being used to glaze a work. Of course, they warned us not to try these things in the university’s kilns.

I fired some glazed works this weekend with a few odds and ends as tests. One of these tests was simply a fishing sinker on a bisqued tile. Such sinkers, as I recall from my fishing days, are made of lead.

The one I used wasn’t as new as the picture above. It had been used and was slightly corroded.

The red in the lower left is iron oxide, as a label on the tile. Some of it leached into the lead on that edge, but I don’t think it changed the color or consistency of the glaze — though I could be wrong. It ran like crazy, which makes sense for a flux material. What was more surprising is how much of it there is on the tile, and subsequently the kiln shelf. The length of the sinker was about 5/8 of an inch long. The tile is roughly 3 1/2 inches square.

I don’t know if or how this would ever make it into my work, but it’s good to know anyway.

I mentioned a couple months ago the struggle I have with posting my personal studio fare on a blog I hope to be a place for some discussion beyond technical issues related to my craft. Like I said, I’m comfortable at this point with mingling the deeper thoughts and my personal work. This may change in the future, however, especially depending on what The Aesthetic Elevator looks like with it’s additional contributors.

Then again, I hope this will be a place for future contributors to share their own work as well. So we may just roll with it.

The following images are from a smoke firing in my electric kiln.

I’m still perfecting this technique, but it’s coming along. Some of the time I don’t use enough newsprint to get enough color and variation. I’ve begun using other organic matter as well for the smoke, including sawdust, leaves and last night a large dead beetle that seemed to give a nice sheen to one of the funnels.

Adding: Julie asked for more about the technique in the comments below, and I thought I’d elaborate on what I know here in the post instead of in the comments.

I usually only fill the bottom of my old electric kiln with pots or sculptures for smoke firings. I run the bottom element on high for 45 minutes to an hour (an hour is probably longer than necessary), let it cool and remove the works. Some of the smoke will discolor the bottom of the kiln, but this goes away during the next higher temperature firing.

Here are my first attempts at getting back into creating my own glazes since getting back into ceramics in the last 18 months. They are a series of cone 04 line blends based on two very simple glazes I had written down in my notes from college, one gloss and one matte.

I like some of the things happening on either end of the spectrums represented here. 2% iron and 2% rutile worked quite beautifully in the matte glaze. For the gloss, the manganese and the combination of cobalt and rutile in higher percentages are quite nice. The photographs don’t convey the subtleties very well. I want to keep pushing these glazes with some different combinations, but probably need to acquire a few more colorants before going at it again.

My electric kiln supposedly has the ability to fire to cone 10, although I haven’t fired it this high yet and probably won’t until I buy new elements. High fire glazes generally have more depth, more complicated surfaces, desired by many ceramic artists. For the time being, I’m looking forward to the challenge of creating subtle and beautiful glazes in a simple electric kiln.

I hope to be able to, some day, do some soda firing again. Design-Realized did an ‘expose’ of sorts on her blog of the inside of a soda kiln in a post called Up Close and Personal: Soda kiln. It’s worth looking at her pictures. A friend who is building a house just outside of town is also interested in building a wood kiln on his property. Apparently a new technology, something called Kaowool, can be used in place of bricks. It’s a lot less expensive than spending $3-4 on single firebricks to piece together a kiln according to my local ceramic supplier.