The Kiln Gods Have Smiled Upon Me!

Over the last week I have been continuing to explore areas of ceramics that I have never been to before.

After spending a short while building my first model (shown in my last entry), I have fired it in the kiln. When firing work in the kiln there is always a small chance that your work could crack and even explode, destroying not only your work but the other student's work that is also being fired. Safe to say, firing is a little stressful and takes a bit of luck. By removing air bubbles from the clay when hand-building the risk can be limited but you're never 100% safe.

It seems The Great Kiln Gods have smiled upon me however, as my work has made it in one piece. I have learnt a lot about working with clay in general from firing my prototype as I have noticed that imperfections are more obvious when the clay dries. Cracks, lumps and bumps as well as the occasional fingerprint have made this prototype look very unprofessional.

Luckily, I have began work on my next version of this salt cellar and as well as the design being better, the finish is also a lot better so far. I will have more to share on on this soon.

Alongside this cellar, I also had a set of tiles fired for testing glazes. I am exploring which coloured underglazes and stoneware glazes would be best to replicated the colours and textures featured at Yuncheng Lake in China. At the moment the four main colours I am trying to achieve are: magenta, olive green, blood orange and a yellow/ochre. Below are the colours and glazes I have had access to:

I have created two sets of four tiles that each use four contem underglaze colours. I have applied a transparent stoneware glaze to one set of the tiles and a turquoise/red glaze to the other set of tiles. The tiles should be fired in the next few days so I hope to share the results of this experiment soon.

In my next entry I will share more about my final design and hopefully the results of my glazing experiments!

Until next week, - Samuel Sant