Within every step of making a pot…..

is an opportunity for aesthetic exploration and expression. At the end of the process are decisions about how to fire, in the middle is forming, and at the beginning is clay. This is the material with which we most intimately acquaint ourselves, and it deserves deep consideration. We were first drawn to experimenting with local, wild clays because of our love of the coarse beauty of historical folk pots. We were aware that these pots were created in an environment where technique, forms and firing all developed in accordance to the characters of the clay available to those potters. Each clay has its own properties which offer limitations and invitations for exploration. A coarse and short clay may not be very good for throwing the demanding form of a pitcher, but it may reveal the most beautiful texture when we cut the foot. Another clay may be so fine that it records our fingerprint, or absorbs wood ash from the kiln in a particularly beautiful way. We love that these wild clays are like dance partners with an attitude- we are in the constant process of finding out what we can do together.

Clay

Our main clay body…

is mostly (75%) comprised of a mixture of two clays from our area: A coarse, red clay that is near our home in the higher mountains, and a more plastic grey clay that settled near a creek bed further down the mountain. We mix these wild clays into a slip and pour them through a screen into a large feed tank. The screening process is one of the first aesthetic and expressive decisions we make- the size of the screen determines the final landscape of particles in the clay beneath our slips and glazes. While dark in color, both these clays are so refractory in their pure state that we still need to add feldspar to the body to make it vitrify and hold water at stoneware temperatures. We also found that we need to add small amounts of ball clay, sand, and silica to our clay body to be durable and make the glazes fit. This brings up an important and interesting question- how much do we tame a clay to meet our functional expectations, and how much do we adapt and learn from the beautiful (and limiting) qualities that drew us to the wild clay in the first place?

Slip

We love the way …

slip and glazes add depth to the pot’s surface by slightly veiling the clay underneath. The way that our dark, coarse clay glows and erupts through slip and glaze is reminiscent of the mystery of snow melting on rocks. We use several different white slips, but one of them is made from an impure kaolin we dig from across the street. This bandana kaolin, as we call it, is prone to blushing pink halos, which come from an alchemy between coarse particles in the iron rich clay interacting with the slip and glaze in the variable atmosphere of our wood kiln.

Glaze

Our glazes are made mostly from wood-ash…

clay, and other local materials with the addition of some commercial materials. We’ve developed a variety of glazes that work well in the different temperature and atmospheric zones of our kiln. One of our favorite glazes is based on a traditional Japanese rice husk ash glaze called nuka. It is a simple mixture of local feldspar, wood ash, and rice husk ash. It is a semi-opaque white glaze that varies from a smooth flowing white to a pebble-y grey. When it’s thick, it is white breaking black over the edges of our dark clay. It is flecked with yellow and blue where it is hit with fly ash, and has a sugary texture in places where it is most protected. It’s an extremely variable glaze, but we are fascinated by all of the variations.