Flue Bowl

Here is the bowl from the video in the previous post. The clay body is a little punky but close to vitrification. And the flue wasn't hot enough for the ash or glaze to completely melt. Here is another video from that day of Jenny the Mad Potter being Jenny.

Dancing with glazes

 Nothing was as I had thought. A head (I soon discarded whole figures, they were simply too much) became for me an entirely unknown thing, without any secure dimensions. -Alberto Giacometti

Shino is a type glaze that I enjoyed using. It was developed in Japan and was the white glaze to be used their. This Tea bowl was wood fired and you can see the wood ash deposit showing up in the glaze as dark speckles. I was playing around with

Another bowl of tea.

"A tea spoon should be made in the way that it does not look beautiful." -Rikyū

The preceding quote clearly expresses the tea ceremony aesthetic. I have had an interest in Zen Buddhism for several years now. It is probably one of the reasons I fell in love with wood-fired ceramics and the tea ceremony. Sen no Rikyū was an influential figure in the development of the tea ceremony. If you have an interest in this subject and or Sen no Rikyū you should read The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. Rikyū along with Chojiro are responsible for the creation of Raku ceramics. Though I shall write about this later. The Royal Ontario Museum (here is a link to the image collection on the ROM website) is a good place to start to see some of the Ceramics used in the Tea Ceremony. They also have a replica tea room on display which is always fun to go and see. Well now for the pictures here are some more samples of my woodfired work. The second image is a porcelain vase that was soda fired.