These three pieces are currently at Womanmade Gallery in current show The Secret.

The opening was concurrent with Drawing on Experience, where I also have one piece. A lot of fun, some good conversations. I circled through the gallery, including the two solo shows, several times. A few pieces caught my attention again and again - so take a look at the online exhibits and see what catches your eye. (Link to Charak’s solo show. Link to Rosen’s solo show.) Sorry not to have any crowd shots to share!

On my mind since then is juror Nancy Charak’s question: what is the difference between drawing and painting? While some media would tend to produce drawings and others tend to produce paintings, this isn’t necessarily true, so the line isn’t drawn there. And there are drawings done in pencil with such amazing gradients that it could be a painting, yet I still call it a drawing. Painting media can create drawings, but can drawing media create paintings? I wonder where watercolor pencils fall. So, the difference between drawing and painting. What do you think?

I may have a mild obsession with taking hot kiln pictures.

Molten kiln wall.

I think this is the best bending-cones picture I’ve gotten: c.8 down, c.9 soft.

I climbed into the soda kiln with my camera a couple of months ago and want to share some of the amazing surfaces in there. This kiln is two or three years old and is fired something between fifty and seventy times a year… that’s a lot of wear.

Hello, my pretty. This is one of the burners. Boo! These are more like seven years old, from what I’ve been told.

Closeup of the flue entrance… love the layering of soda with the floating glaze. I’d like to use this surface for something.

Entrance to the chimney again… but looking up. Look at all that soda built up on the refractory brick. I’d like to use this texture on a big sculptural piece.

Sitting on the floor and looking toward the front. The opening is one of the soda ports. When we add the soda, we flip the angle iron toward the outside wall (at the left).  Lots of soda lands on the target brick, bottom center, and builds up in the area behind it.

The range of color the wall picks up is beautiful. The depth of the colors would translate well to an oil painting. Maybe when the kiln gets rebuilt I can have this section of the wall. The interior wythe is hard brick, to better resist wear, so even this small part would be quite hefty. It would still be worth it.

Here’s another super crusty part, above the soda port. I like the blue and green color and the rippled texture. Reminds me of Gail Nichols’ work a bit. It has more green than over by the flue - a little more iron? - and is a bit less crusty. Great surface. I love it.

It went well! The difference between a “dirty” and regular firing: super heavy reduction, extra carbon trapping (going for grey to charcoal porcelain), and extra soda. It’s excellent. I had a lot of work - nearly half the kiln - so this is truly the highlights reel. (And I haven’t even shown you the pods.)

The surfaces of this vessel are particularly fantastic. Went in with an unglazed exterior (and plenty of copper glaze on the inside), came out like this. Purple to yellowish, matte to glossy. Grolleg porcelain. Amazing, no?

The bathtubs turned out as hilariously as I thought they would. They’re soap dishes.

Set of houses. Iron stoneware washed with chromium oxide, and came out wonderfully. Must do that again.

This little dish got a big drip of silicone carbide in it, which made a lovely accent.

The newer short cup form. The surfaces came out so well. The heavy reduction really pulls the iron through.

The positive side of the busy coin is that I’ve had a bunch of really intense weeks lately and learned and experienced a lot. The negative is not too much downtime in which to decompress, process, and share!

Some people manage to pull together a post a day - and I’ve realized that they do it by keeping it short and sweet. As you probably guessed by my rather image-intense post about materials over temoku, I tend to be thorough. This approach is too time-consuming for the pace of my life of late, so I’m going to try a new approach. One post, every other day, until I am caught up with everything I wanted to share (and that list is growing fast!)

Hope you’ll stay tuned. As a note - I check the comment moderation queue regularly to clean out the spam. So if your comment doesn’t appear, it may have been deleted accidentally - please resubmit it!

Here are forty-two cups and teabowls that I dipped in slip on Wednesday evening, setting out to dry. I’m trying some new things here. Forms that’ve been on my mind for weeks. I’m simultaneously pretty sure I’m crazy and pretty sure I’m not crazy for trying seven new slip recipes at once. And did I mention that they’ll recieve an assortment of new shino recipes and get sent through the next dirty firing?

I think it’ll be great.

Contemplating the wonderful wood+salt-fire results have given me a lot of food for thought. (I know, I know, I haven’t shown you the results yet. Soon, dear readers, soon! Here’s one to tide you over. It’s one of my favorite cups from the firing, and went to its new home this morning.)

Some photos from the early May firing in Galena.

Sunset.

Pre-firing. The woodpiles have an architecture of their own.

Nighttime. We had fun burning this hollow log. It made a fun chimney.

Firebox, middle of the night. The visually detected color is much whiter.

Next morning. We’ve been firing for about twelve hours. Note the depleted wood supply.

Power. The kiln shed is out of frame to the right.

This is what it’s like out there.

Smoking away after a salt stoke.

Creekside.

My contribution to the landscape: a bisqued house.

These are the cups whose boxes were in the kiln at the time. Too pretty not to take a picture.

Freshly stoked kiln.

Spring arrived late this year.