Woodfire Pottery
For our ancestors, storing and carrying food and water was an essential task of survival. Hides, gourds, baskets were surely the first containers used, until around 7000 B.C., when "fired" pottery first appeared. What a tremendous innovation it must have been in their struggle to find and store food and water until it was needed. Electricity and natural gas fuels are inventions of our century; wood was certainly among the first materials used for firing by our ancestors.
My wood-fire work is fired locally in Jay Widmer's Alsea Anagama, located in the Oregon Coastal Range. Loading, firing, cooling, and unloading takes ten days and four cords of wood--a tremendous amount of physical labor and patience. Six people work together, splitting wood and taking shifts stoking the kiln. In carefully choreographed rhythm, we stoke the front port and two side ports every three to five minutes, for 48 hours, eventually bringing the kiln to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit.
A unique aspect of wood firing is wood ash glaze. Wood ash, called fly-ash, is a natural byproduct of wood fuel. Chemically, wood ashes vary enormously and can be as different as chalk and granite. Pots go into the kiln unglazed, pottery surfaces are melted by the tremendous heat, and the fly-ash lands there creating the glazed surfaces on wood-fire pottery, just as it did for our ancestors.
Glaze formation does not occur until the end of the firing, when maximum temperature is reached. All the components of wood ash combine to form glass, introduce color, crystalline opacity interesting flecking on finished surfaces. As a result, the pot becomes a register of the firing.
I very much enjoy the surprises of this technique. It has been an artistically enriching experience to develop my aesthetic in wood-fire.
-Dale Donovan
Stoking the kiln |
The kiln at 2400 degrees |