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!
Since the quality of the Youtube version of the unloading was so poor, I decided to uploaded to Vimeo, one of the many competitors that keep popping up. It had its share of frustrations as well in the upload process, but I’m much happier with the final video.
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 found a few more of photos from this last firing that I hadn’t uploaded yet. I suppose that’s the problem with taking plenty of memory cards, it’s easy to loose track of the pictures. These were from Wednesday night, when we were doing hikidashi (pulling teabowls from the kiln). Anyway, they’re now up on my flickr page, and also are part of the Santatsugama set.
So while I was at the firing, I had a bunch of fun, once again, with the video features of my canon sd850. The first bits to be processed and uploaded are some time lapse videos of loading the kiln. The process of loading a kiln ends up being pretty slow and complex. I’m writing up an explanation of all the factors that go into that slowness, but decided to put them in a separate post. For now, you can enjoy the process of loading a kiln at x30 speed and set to fun music. It’s pretty fascinating, really.
Loading a kiln, from the inside: This video is shot from one of the stoke holes, and follows the loading of the shelf after the middle firebox. Since it’s so close to the middle firebox, where we’ll be putting in sidestoking wood, we’re being careful not to put anything small on the back side of the shelf that might get knocked over. It’s about 3 hours boiled down to 5 minutes.
Loading a Kiln, from the outside: This video is of loading the next set of two shelves, but shot from outside of the kiln entrance. It really shows a different aspect of the process. For every person in the kiln there’s another few outside, prepping the pots, organizing, discussing, shooting the breeze, and just hanging around. It covers about 2 hours in 4 minutes.
I’ve just discovered you can watch these in higher quality, but only on the Youtube website. So follow them back to their youtube pages for a less grainy version.
