Blackhills Entry 5: The Wood Firing
I’ve only ever fired my work in electric kilns – I don’t have my own kiln so I have been reliant on the kilns available in pottery classes and those owned by local potters who have kindly shared their kiln space with me. I’ve been interested in wood kilns since first learning pottery when I was 11 from a potter who wood fired his work, and after visiting a hill-climbing noborigama kiln in Japan a couple of years ago. However, because I’ve been dependent on others’ kilns, I had never really thought about how my work might look if I could choose different firing methods or how the act of firing the work yourself can change how you feel about it.
While at Blackhills, I fired glaze test bowls in a gas kiln and I helped with a wood firing – my first. There is so much about the experience of wood firing that I loved. Before the firing, I enjoyed the preparatory work of wadding all the pieces and bringing work out to the kiln. This felt like extra time spent with biscuit-fired pots that I don’t usually get. The firing itself was physical and took focus, and I enjoyed knowing that the only way to get the cones down is if you put the work in.
We lit the kiln at 16:00 on March 18th and finished firing 29 hours later at about 21:00 on March 19th. I took the first shift on the 18th until dinner time and then took the early morning shift on the 19th. I could have handed over to John at about lunchtime, but I was enjoying it too much and completely lost track of time. Instead of minutes or hours, time became segmented by opening and closing the metal sheets over the three fireboxes to shoot lengths of pine in. Almost immediately after shooting each length of pine in, the temperature climbed up, paused, and as soon as it dropped a couple degrees it was time to shoot more lengths of pine in. We started reduction at about 1000C. At that point, it became about maintaining a level of smokiness rather than gaining temperature, so we loaded up the fireboxes and moved a passive damper into the exit flue. We maintained reduction for just over an hour and then the focus changed back to increasing temperature.
Firing
Choose pine lengths
Open protective metal flaps over fireboxes
Shoot pine lengths in
Close metal flaps
Take a drink
Listen to the fire
Pay attention to fire, smoke, pyrometers
Repeat
Repeat
Repeat
It was a lot of work, good work. I loved being outside, the smell of the fire, putting my own energy into a key part of a pot’s making, and working with John to achieve this. I wrote in my firing log that the combination of the physical work with paying attention made it perfect work. Looking back on it, that still feels true.
We opened the kiln in the morning on March 21st. For the first time I saw my work in the way I’ve wanted to see it. I’ve only had small glimpses of this in the past and was unprepared for what it would be like to see the work I’ve been chasing.
