Wood Pots, Part Deux ...

I'm posting a few more good pots from the weekend's Truro woodfiring. And I urge any of you Facebook users to keep an eye on Kimberly Sheerin Medeiros's "The Barn Pottery" Facebook page over the next few days. She was here today and I photographed about 20 of her pots for her. Kim does a lot of sliptrailing and decoration on her pots and they took very well to the Castle Hill kiln. They're worth taking a look at.

Now, on to my pots. At top: Brian Taylor, ceramics director at Truro Center for the Arts and the guy who guides the firing, unloading; a fully-blasted vase, fired right in the firebox; a transparent celadon/Shino vase; very small faceted cup; a lovely little cup, traded away to Kim Medeiros for one of her tumblers. An even trade, I think.

Gotta fire with wood more often ...

Cleaning up a few ash-encrusted pots this morning. Those pots closest to the fire got pretty hammered, which is what you expect. The top photo in this batch is a small cup you can see sitting serenely on the firebox floor an hour or two into the firing of the train kiln at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. In the end, it was overwhelmed by the growing bed of coals that built under the hobs. A very rough and blasted pot, but one of my favorites from this firing.

I fired this kiln with Brian Taylor, the Castle Hill ceramics guru, and friends Kim Medeiros, Gail Turner, Matt Kemp and a few other folks. Eight of us in all.

It was a good firing, though I've got about 15 pots that I will put into my own kiln for refiring. There were cool parts - the upper left rear had only cone 2 flat - and glazes did not mature back there. But I have no doubt that can be taken care of by firing in my gas kiln.

As it is, I've to a dozen or so pots that I'm in love with. Always dangerous, because that means I put ridiculously high prices on them so that I can live with them for a while. I'd like to get to the point that wood pots were not as precious to me as they are now. And I think that can only be done by firing regularly in my own wood kiln. I'm talking with a friend about that now. We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, here are some pots from the firing. At the top is the firebox cup (the Japanese call those pots "yohen," I think.) And below that is the same pot in the firebox. Then a few more of the successful pots.

Unnamed no'theaster blowing through

Winds are blowing into hurricane force territory today, up close to 75 mph at times around Cape Cod. I've got work to do, but thought I'd photograph the wet front of the studio with my iPhone as I emerged from a windy morning trip for coffee at Coffee Obsession in Falmouth.
Onward into the day.

A stoking moment from last weeked

Kim Medeiros set fire to the first kindling this past weekend at the Castle Hill kiln at the Highlands Center in Truro. Pretty early, maybe about 7 that morning, I was coherent enough to turn on my video camera and use it a bit.

Weekend in Zombieland ... firing the kiln

When the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill built its train kiln a few years ago, it sought out a place with open land and few neighbors. It found the old U.S. Air Force radar installation on the ocean side of Cape Cod, several miles from the main "campus" of Castle Hill. Once home to several hundred Air Force personnel charged with spotting incoming nuclear bombers, this is now a strange amalgam of slowly deteriorating, asbestos-ridden military buildings, a summer theater, a working radar installation (yes, still), a weather observation station, a parking lot for transit buses, scientific ventures, a train kiln ... and zombies.

Well, not the zombies, as far as we know, but the first thought of my visiting niece during this week's firing was, "Wow, this place looks like 'The Walking Dead.' "

It sits on what would otherwise be prime waterfront real estate. But it's owned by the U.S. Park Service and strictly regulated. The building of the train kiln by visiting potter Donovan Palmquist was very closely inspected. 

So, arriving is a little strange, but the kiln is beautifully crafted and kept clean, as is the kiln shed. Brian Taylor, a Westerner by birth, oversees the clay program at Castle Hill and he runs the loading and firing. Brian is even-tempered, does not panic at the slightest dip of the pyrometer, and works well with a crew of potter/stokers whose experience runs from a few months to more than 30 years.

It took several hours to finish glazing pots, wadding, loading and closing up the door on Saturday. Sunday morning at about 5:45, Kim Medeiros and I unlocked the gate (letting the zombies out to ravage Truro) and then Kim put the first match to paper and kindling.

We worked a six-hour shift, got the pyro to about 350F and then retired to naps and later dinner in Provincetown. (And a thank-you to Castle Hill, which let us share the school's apartment they keep for visiting faculty.) The rest of the crew took over for the next 24 hours and when we got back for our second shift at noon Monday, cone 12 was bending near the front and we were just a few hours from shutdown. Brian tried his fine-tuning of the front- and side-stoking routine to even out the kiln temperatures. It looked pretty good, so we'll find out how it went Saturday afternoon. The last wood went in about 4:15 Monday, after 34 hours of firing. We open Saturday morning at 9.

The photos: The spooky view from the kiln shed; Brian Taylor, left, and potter Matt Kemp load; Kim Medeiros puts her Bic lighter to good use, getting the firing going at dawn; camera in the firebox after a couple of hours of burning, my teabowl on the left, Kim's big bowl in the middle; cone 12 nearly over at the front, next to the neck of a Kim vase; Traci Noone side-stokes.

"Concepts in Clay" opens Friday

Gail Turner, of Mill Stone Pottery in Dennis, and I talked with a group of docents today at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, answering as many questions as we could about the work now on display there. "Concepts in Clay" is a show of work by members of Cape Cod Potters, a very loosely organized group of clay people here on the Cape. The show was juried by Ellen Shankin, of Floyd, Va.
The show was designed to challenge clayworkers to think about their process and their ideas, and then put those thoughts into words and into clay. That's the way I understood it, anyway.
The result is a fine show of work, from functional to sculptural. Each entrant's work is mounted separately on a pedestal or pedestals, allowing separation from the other pots or sculptures in the show.
And on one wall are eight large photographs, shot by this photographer, showing steps in the clayworking process. Images of Kim Medeiros, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Caruso, Tessa Morgan, and myself make up the wall display. Firing is represented by my loaded kiln and flame protruding from the noborigama of Robert Compton, in Bristol, VT. You can see the photos in one of the overall shots here.
The show opens this week, with a formal reception (that means free beer and wine, people) this Friday, from 5 to 7 p.m. Come one, come all.
Photos, top to bottom: bottles by Toni Levin, Oribe work by Linda Riehl, big serving bowls by Kevin Nolan, coil-built and wood-fired vases from Frances Johnson.

Sunshine after the storm

Sandy went away from Cape Cod yesterday, taking a sudden left into New Jersey. The winds died here in midafternoon and then the clouds made way for the moon around 9. We survived just fine, without even a power or cable TV outage. Some of our friends in town were not so lucky, and power is still out in some parts of Falmouth. Trees came down in the gusts of 50 mph wind and knocked out power lines and poles.
But other than a few traffic hazards and thoroughly undermined Surf Drive on the south shore, we got through OK. Even the coffee shop was open this morning at 6, as always.
I spent most of the day glazing pots for the woodfiring this weekend. Kim Medeiros was here using my Shinos, temmoku and a couple of other glazes. We're hoping this weekend's weather will be entirely anti-hurricane.
Here's a look at our back yard, the day after the (not very) big storm.