We’re most of the way done with loading. Both the middle and the front fireboxes are a bit roomier than normal. We aren’t going to be using the far back firebox, since we think it doesn’t effect the kiln. We just used the space for pots instead. The kiln is packed very tightly.
So, far too early tomorrow morning, I will head off to Seabeck, WA for our woodfiring. I’ll have my iphone, so it will be my goal to post a series of small updates during the firing. I will apologize in advance for the spelling, since the wordpress iphone app lacks any form of spell check.
Here’s a shot of some of my preparations. I have three giant bins this size, along with a milk crate of tiny pieces. I’ve taken to using pillow stuffing to protect some of the delicate wings of my critters. However, in this shot, I think laziness played more of a role than prudence. They do look like they’re taking a nap in a cloud, though.
I’m quite excited about the firing coming up in late October. I’ve had some extra time to get pieces together for it, and I feel like it’s paying off. I think I’m on track to make enough work for my galleries, and have a holiday sale at my studio. I’ll post dates and stuff like that once I have them, but in the mean time, here’s more of a sneak peak at my drying shelves.
These are the ones that I finished most recently.
Also, in my studio, I have a big white board. I use it to make random notes to myself, sketch ideas, and just doodle stuff. I really like the idea I have on there now, but I’ll have to wait and see as to how it comes together. I’ve been big on antlers recently, but I don’t know how well they’ll survive the firing. They might just droop. To avoid that, I’ll have to make them very stocky. Also, do you you recognize the guy in pink?
In this last week, I decided to shuffle all of my work between my galleries. I just took most of the stuff from gallery A and gave it to gallery B and so forth. This just keep everything fresh for everyone. Part of the fun of this (besides trekking all over Seattle with a suitcase full of critters), is that most of the work I have for sale in my studio has been refreshed too! The new list of pieces for sale is up on flicker. Stop, browse, and have yourself some fun!
When I work on my regular sized beasts, I tend to make them in batches. I’ll start with about 3 to 6 balls of clay, and work on them in parallel over the course of a few weeks. Often each step in the process of making a beast will only take an hour to half hour, but I’ll need to let the parts rest and dry for a day between each step. This makes sure that seems don’t reopen or wet legs don’t get attached to dryer bodies. I’ll often spend a morning or a day doing nothing but making legs or sanding backs.
Before the last firing, I decided to track a whole group of critters as I made them. I started with a bag of clay and ended up with Beast with a Ball, Flatout Beast, Mournful beast with horns, the papaya beast, and the two stilt beasts having a conversation. This last week I finally got around to putting together most of the timelapse footage, and have four new videos for you.
I find it very amusing to watch the clues as to the progression of time: What I’m wearing, what color bandana I have, if I have a soda, and how messy my work area has gotten.
Before this last firing, I filmed all the steps in sculpting one set of beasts. I’ve been calling it “Trio”, but in some ways it’s also “Cuddle” #2. I liked the beasts I made for “cuddle” and wanted to see a larger arrangement of them. It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to make the three fit together. Anyway, here’s the timelapse video fully tracking them from beginning to end.
I really like arranging my beasts in groups. And this sort of lumpy, toothy form really appeals to me. For a bit, I’ve been meaning to make a pile of 10 or 20 guys. Maybe next firing I’ll have time.
I’ve just about finished photographing all of my work from this last woodfiring. I have a couple pieces left that I’m still doing some mixed media work on, specifically a few beasts that will be walking on stilts and the big city beast. The stilt beasts will be done hopefully in another day or two, but it will be a bit longer for the big city beast. In addition to having some mixed media work to go, he’s also too big for my photo set up. It’s located in the shower stall of the spare bathroom of our studio, and maxes out on any piece bigger than six inches or so. I’ll have to take the city beast out to the other side of the Sound and get Steve Sauer to photograph him for me.
Anyway, here’s the point of this post. My new work!
We went and unloaded Santatsugama yesterday, and it looks like everyone got some wonderful results. We had to make an early start after a late 4th of July party, but it was completely worth it. I’m very happy with my work from this firing. There was lots of carbon trapping, resulting in ghostly looking grey blues in addition to the beautiful gloss orange red that we’ve been getting recently. However, the black flashes that we’d been seeing recently were much less prominent. We think this was due to difference in atmospheric conditions in the kiln during the cooling, but that’s another post.
As I said, I think it was a good firing. One very sad thing though is that Erin’s cabbage jars self-destructed. Some clays just don’t do well in this kiln, and will shatter unprovoked as they cool. Each cabbage jar would come out, look beautiful, and then “ping” itself into a pile of leaves. Hopefully we’ll see some surviving ones in the future. Here’s a sneak peek as to some of what I got out. I’ll be doing formal documentation photograph over the course of the next week. I also have a fair amount of cleaning up and mixed media work still to go, especially with the big guy.
Also, like the loading, I took stop motion video of the unloading. It followed the whole unloading (3 hours instead of 2 days), and compacts down into 5 minutes. It’s pretty fun to see. (Fun fact. I broke my gorilla pod during the filming of the video. It just plain wore out from overuse after 3 months. I’m hard on tech. When I broke my old camera after a year, I’d taken 9,000 photos with it). Anyway, enjoy the video. If you go to the youtube page for it, there should be higher quality version. (It takes about a day for the high quality option to show up)
I’ve been really busy in the past few weeks, getting ready for a big wood firing at Santatsugama. Santatsugama (3 dragon kiln) is the anagama style wood kiln in Seabeck, WA where I regularly fire. We fire 4 times a year, so I need to have all of my work for the next four months ready to go by this Saturday. As you can imagine, this leads to some long days and late nights in the studio before the firing. However, at this point, everything that can be finished is finished, and there’s finally nothing left for me to do. All of my work is in the bisque kiln now, and I won’t be able to touch it until Friday when I pack it up for the drive to the wood kiln. This means I’m finally free for a day or two, even if it means I have to get caught up on stuff I missed while I was in the studio.
We’re planning on following our normal schedule for this firing, which is to spend Saturday and Sunday loading, and then fire up the kiln at midnight Sunday night. We’ll continue for 150 (+/-5) hours straight, finishing up Friday. I’ll write up a whole post explaining wood fire at some point, but in the mean time, this flickr set should be able give you an idea of what it’s like.
Also, here’s a sneak peek of what’s going into the kiln. Once I’m back from the firing, I’ll be uploading many more pictures of these guys, including some more timelapse videos. And yes, the guy in the bottom right is City Beast 2.0, who starred in the first timelapse video. Pretty exciting!
