Wali Hawes 1952 - 2014
                          pottery and more!

Wali Hawes Potter's Diary

Wood Firing the Cat Arch

From the 29th-30th May we fired the Cat-Arch kiln for the first time this year. We invited Ori Kamaoka and Eddie Peters to join us over the weekend. Off-cuts from a local sawmill had been cut and stacked a month beforehand allowing for drying to take place. The Cat-Arch is about 0,7 cu metres and can take quite a few pieces. It is designed for salting and not for ash effects which seem to confuse the punters like hell because most if not all wood-firing in Japan is of the anagama type or noborigama so most people expect pieces to come out draped in ash rolling off all over the place. I use a semi-porcelain body which responds beautifully to the salting and wood effects with lovely pink flashing. Invited potters used a raku body from Tajimi (Eddie Peters) and an iron rich bbody from Awajishima Island in the Inland Sea (Orie Kamaoka) Atsuko Ito experimented with my "hanjiki" and a body from Shigaraki which is popular among wood firers in the Chubu Region and maybe beyond as far as I know. Firing started around 11-ish and because of greenware we started really slowly. The other thing with this kiln is that firing only twice a year means that it gets really damp. Average rainfall in Japan is one in three days so alot of time goes into drying the kiln out. By midnight we were around 750 and I left Eddie with the following advice before turning in. "Follow your instincts!" I had seen him fire the Bottle kiln during the "Firebrand " workshop and how he took it up to temperature in record time but I guess the bottle kiln and the Cat Arch is not the same kettle of kiln. I took over around four in the morning. The dawn was gently breaking through the trees and the birds created an incredible din. I wondered how I managed to sleep through such a cacophony everyday without noticing a thing. The kiln gradually climbed to 1000 and something when Atsuko and Orie-san took over. I have a problem working with Atsuko. She is loathe to follow anything that is beyond her own experience or what she has been told. So true to form she started changing everything, the pyrometers, the system of draughts and the damper and true to form temperature plummets. She justifies her action as "....following my heart" when what she means is that she is following certain precepts as to how one fires a wood kiln. It makes no difference pointing out that a Cat Arch isn`t an anagama and that a different approach is needed namely getting to know tha kiln and how it behaves rather than applying theoretical ideas. This kiln has a tendency to hit plateaus so patience is really needed. You can`t impose on it because it won`t respond. You have got to be on your toes responding to every nuance and clue. There is too much going on to miss a beat. So we continued and by 11 Sunday night we started salting. The pyrometer read 1037 max and the cones still hadn`t gone down. (I put them the wrong way round and yes indeed they did start to bend but backwards!) We must have thrown in about 3-4 kilos and at 12 midnight we shut down. Everybody expected a disaster. I just waited. The semi-porcelain responded really well with a lovely sheen and rang like a bell. A liner glaze worked well too. Orie-san`s pieces came out with a really Bizen look but Eddie`s raku body looked very sorry for itself. Far too porous it didn`t it absorbed all the salt the way blotting paper does to ink even though it was in the hottest part. A compact body is what is needed. Pieces from the firing are on display at the Summer Show at Gallery Kirin in Shigaraki. Wood firing is just sooooo GREAT!!!!! Results can be seen if you go to the "As I feel"link

29/05/2004

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