Story of a Kiln
The kiln is the focal point of my clay studio—it is its heart. When I first wanted to have a clay studio, what I meant is that I wanted a kiln. Everything else—the wheel, the work tables, glazes—would coalesce around that one object. The kiln. I always wanted to make pots from stoneware clay, and to fire them in reduction; I always yearned for that transmuted, alchemical look I saw in pots that seemed to have visited another dimension and returned instead of just being made by someone. As a potter I strive for work that transcends my making of it, and I have shoveled clay from roadcuts, sifted volcanic tuff from the Jemez, washed the ashes from my wood stove, in this pursuit. But above all I have built kilns. In eight years I have built five, and none has worked to my satisfaction.
I like to think I can pinpoint the exact moment when I resolved to replace the last kiln I built with a commercial kiln. And not just any commercial kiln—why not, I suddenly thought, get the most advanced and efficient kind available? Why not get a fiber kiln. A kiln without bricks, those archetypal building blocks, and without an arch. Just a metal box. There was a specific moment in which I first had this thought, but of course the thought itself was the culmination of months—of late nights waiting for cones to melt, of bag wall adjustments and note-taking, of uneven temperatures and unpredictable results…
It was early January. It was cold and wet. And late—the firing that I had promised my family would be done by dinnertime, or maybe a little after, was still not done. It was midnight, and I was starting to think that even if the kiln did manage to reach temperature, that the pots inside would be no good. I lay on the couch, not tired, not feeling anything at all but vaguely aware that something was wrong. Not just with the firing, either—something had gone wrong with my whole approach. It had become an obsessive, ritual-laden enactment of the right ways to do things. And these ways weren’t yielding results. I needed a new kiln. I needed a new heart, a new thing around which my work would coalesce. I switched on the light, forgetting for a moment the roar of the propane burners out in the back yard as I thumbed through Ceramics Monthly, for once grateful for all the advertisements. In five minutes I had my answer: The Geil Kiln. That was what I needed. One of those.
The following morning I called the company up, filled with renewed purpose and excited about the prospect of beginning a new phase of my career. In this new phase I would narrow my focus to the pots themselves and stop worrying about the process behind them. I would buy commercial ingredients and stop trying so hard to be different…fourteen thousand dollars, for one of those new kilns. I called my second and third choices. I made measurements and calculations, but there really weren’t that many to make. Fourteen thousand dollars. I knew what I wanted; I could see what would be best for my work. I shrugged, recalling that moment the night before, lying on the couch, when I had realized exactly what had to happen. There wasn’t much I could do about it—just make the call and put in the order. I had lost enough work and enough time to be certain that the time had come, and suddenly everything was simple. I went into credit card debt just putting down a deposit, but that didn’t matter.
One thing that did matter, though: the delivery date for the new Geil kiln would be in July. It was only January. That was a lot of time. It wasn’t that I was impatient, but the problem was that I might have too much time to think. Sure enough, in a few weeks I began to doubt my decision.
In one way, being an artist, you shun good decisions—you embrace a life of impulses, some of which seem irrational, irresponsible, even. You spend months pursuing an idea and then abandon it; you work long hours and forego all shortcuts and economy. But in another way, one could argue, being an artist is simply a matter of making one decision after another. You make decisions about everything. You leave nothing outside of your scrutiny, nothing unexamined. Much of making art is simply a matter of problem-solving—never more so than when firing a kiln—and it’s in my nature to review every decision I’ve made, to re-think things again and again.
My wife has a joke she likes to repeat when we’ve considered an expensive purchase and then decided on a cheaper one: “we’re makin’ money,” she says. It’s a way of feeling we’ve earned something that underneath, we’re a little afraid we don’t deserve. By the end of February, I had cancelled my order with Geil and sent a deposit check to another kiln company whose name I won’t mention here—let’s call it the Other Kiln Company—who promised to deliver me a twenty-four cubic foot updraft kiln inside of three weeks—for a mere seven thousand dollars. I was makin’ money.
True, I sacrificed the efficiency I had wanted. True, this kiln was built from brick and wasn’t substantially different from a kiln I could build myself. But, I reasoned, somebody else was responsible for the design, and if there were ever a problem—if the kiln didn’t get to temperature, or didn’t fire evenly—I could call someone. That would be good. And, the head of the company, Bill, was someone who was very easy to call. He seemed a lot nicer and more available than the head of the Geil company, for example. Bill picked up the phone himself, and he liked to chat.
The deposit I had given Geil dropped back into my credit card account, and suddenly I was halfway to my purchase. I should relax. But in the days before the projected delivery date for my new Other Kiln, I started loosing sleep. Fate has a way of exaggerating itself when you try to ignore it, and I had recently taken a sizable dinnerware order—something quite untypical for me. “Absolutely,” I reassured my customer as I took his large deposit check. “These’ll be ready very soon.” The projected deadline for kiln delivery soon passed; no word. Suddenly, Bill didn’t answer his phone.
Until a Saturday morning, when he suddenly called. His son and a friend were on their way, eager to unload and begin installation the following day. “Great,” I said, excitedly wondering where I’d rent a forklift on a Sunday…another sleepless night, and the next day I was ringing up a purchase in my gallery when I saw a flatbed truck slowing down, looking for a place to park. On it was a great, green, box framed with angle iron. I was eager to go out and take a look, but the customers kept shopping, and talking, and soon Bill’s son came in. His name was Joe. I shook his hand as though he were a hero of some kind, come to rescue me from my years of kiln-building, of wearing through leather gloves slogging bricks, of pouring over diagrams and counting out graph-paper squares. Joe barely smiled, and looked back down at the floor. He stuffed his hand back in the pocket of a down vest. He had a heavy brow, hunched shoulders, and the shifty, distracted look of a drug dealer. “Want me to go back and take a look at your site?” he asked. “Just hang on a minute,” I said. “Let me take you back there.” He waited for a minute, not talking, sitting forward on his chair like a kid in the principal’s office. Then he left, and a moment later our dogs started barking. Joe had gone back to take a look at the site.
It occurred to me that I never received an invoice or contract of any kind from The Other Kiln Company, and that in fact, there had been a distinct shift in tone as soon as I had mailed my personal check (no credit cards were accepted): gone was the chatty tone Bill had first used, replaced first by an answering machine, and now with a very surly son. I chased Joe back into the yard, and shook hands with his assistant, who kept his mirror sunglasses on. He crossed his arms and nodded, saying nothing. But I was unable to shake my excitement. I ran out to the truck and peeked at the kiln, chained on its flatbed truck. It looked a little weird, I had to admit. I could see that the welds were pitted and spattered; that insulating tiles around the door had come loose; that the metal sheathing on the door hadn’t lined up properly and that someone had snipped at it with shears, bending the ragged metal back, enlarging the spy hole so it met up with the hole in the brick behind it. The following day, when the kiln was off the truck, I had a chance to peek inside. Arch bricks had slipped, and insulating bricks in the walls were loose enough to be pulled free. Looking up at the roof from inside, daylight was visible through cracks. When maneuvered with a fork lift, one of the metal rails welded to the base of the kiln fell off. Joe borrowed my sledge hammer, and banged off the corresponding rail from the opposite side—otherwise, the kiln wouldn’t be level. That was when I called Bill. I got the now-familiar answering machine, but my tone had shifted, too; he called me back immediately. “How’s the weather out there?” he asked, his former persona suddenly returning. “You’re gonna love this kiln,” he told me. “Just wait until you get a chance to fire it. It practically fires itself.” I wanted to believe him so badly that I allowed myself to be convinced. I allowed the installation to continue. I wanted him to be right, and I wanted the kiln to work so I could get back to work, too. Back out in the yard, I tried to help as Joe struggled to maneuver the kiln. He had found the pressure-treated 4 x 4 beams my wife used to edge her garden, and had pulled one up to use as a lever. “If you move the, whatever you call it, the fulcrum, a little closer in then it’ll lift easier,” I heard myself say as we both applied our weight to the end of the beam. “But the kiln won’t lift as high, though.”
By the end, as Joe explained how to use the kiln, I was letting my lack of enthusiasm show. “First,” he instructed, “you’re gonna want to bisque-fire your clay. A lot of water is gonna escape when you first start. Like steam. Then around five hundred degrees or so, that’s when the actual water molecules are going to boil out. Keep the damper real closed down,” he said, “like this.” He held his thumb and forefinger a couple inches apart. “Uh huh,” I said. “Listen. Before you guys leave, could you try to re-align the burners, so they really point into the ports? A couple of them are, like, really off.”
Joe spent an extra half-hour under the kiln with my pipe wrench, but without cutting and re-threading the pipe, there was little he could do. Fate was exaggerating itself to me again. Okay, I admitted. I compromised a little on my kiln purchase. But Fate would make my little compromise into something huge, just to make sure I understood: when you falter, when you see what is the right thing to do but don’t do it, you end up not just a little wide of the mark—you don’t even hit the target at all. I definitely felt that I was in the grip of Fate and that I was being pulled along, watching myself as though through the wrong end of a telescope, as I wrote that final check to The Other Kiln company and saw their empty flatbed truck drive away. “Now, if I don’t like this kiln,” I began, weakly, on the phone again with Bill, “then I’m not going to accept it. You guys are gonna have to come and take it away!” “Well,” Bill answered casually. “We’re not really in the habit of offering a money-back guarantee…”
After the first firing I examined the kiln again. Bits of kiln cement and brick had rained from the roof, sticking to the glazed ware. Several rows of arch brick had contracted and bubbled—they couldn’t take the heat. I had another few sleepless nights; I had made a mistake—I got that—I had done the wrong thing—okay. I contacted a few other potters who recently had purchased Other Kilns and heard a few stories that were worse than mine, even, with doors falling off, arches falling in. I better fight, I decided. I better get a lawyer and demand my money back. I could accept being punished by Fate for my mistake, but not getting swindled by a hapless, crooked business man.
In my fury I called Geil again and begged them to re-instate my order. They took my three thousand dollar deposit again. I looked at the invoice I received via email. Shipping date: October 2007. It was still only May. Wasn’t there anything I could do to speed up the order? I pleaded. In the meantime, I filed my first lawsuit, wondering what response I’d get from Bill as I dropped a fat manila envelope in the mail to him.
The response was a snowstorm of legal paperwork and obfuscation; it turned out that Bill’s other brother was a lawyer who had represented his father in situations just like this, before. He called with a threat: the lawsuit had no legal basis, and it was going to really cost me, for him to come out squash this case. If I didn’t drop it right now I’d be looking at thousands of dollars of legal expenses…fortunately I had found an organization called California Lawyers for the Arts. For thirty dollars, they had referred me to a lawyer for a consultation, and his advice had been to sue. “Those guys are completely full of shit! the lawyer laughed, when I described the threatening phone call to him. His name was Greg: a fast-talking, mean-sounding, LA attorney—I had the impression that his regular clients were large media corporations defending themselves against pornography lawsuits. Just the sort of person I needed, I thought, gulping and pacing the room every time I dialed his number. “You’ve got thirty seconds to spit your question out,” he shouted to me once through his speaker phone when I started out mumbling, letting my intimidation show. But Greg patiently sent me examples of the documents I’d need to file: Opposition to the motions to Dismiss and Change Venue…Affidavit in Support…and when I sent him drafts of what I’d done, he was encouraging. “Find your New Mexico Long Arm Statute; you’re gonna need to cite that,” he said. “Purposeful Availment…put that phrase in there somewhere…don’t worry about this,” he advised. “You gotta treat the whole thing as a hobby. You don’t get worked up about it, you just put a little time into your lawsuit here and there. File the documents and then wait. See what they do.”
That’s what I did. How the lawsuit turns out—that’s another story. Meanwhile, through June and July I had plenty of time to chalk the outline where the new kiln would rest on the empty cement pad behind my studio. The greenware stacked up, waiting to be fired. I tried to imagine what it the new kiln would look like…sitting there...or would something else go wrong? What did Fate have in store, this time? I waited, and waited some more, through the hottest weeks of the summer. And then one morning in late August, as I was toasting a cinnamon bagel and helping my son get ready for school, with the Chimayo Studio Tour just a few weeks away, the phone rang: Geil Kilns CA, the caller ID said. I found it reassuring to speak to a receptionist and not the head of a company: my order was being shipped, I learned. I called the freight driver and arranged delivery for 8:00 the following morning. Was there a truck stop nearby where he could sleep and fuel up? the driver asked. Sure, I said. Right near our house...
That was the Friday before Indian Market Weekend—the zenith of Santa Fe tourism. In the afternoon I sold pots to a few refugees from the Santa Fe crowds, nice folks who didn’t seem to notice how picked-over my gallery looked—in the evening, my wife and I braved the crowds and headed to Santa Fe for the Chamber Music Festival’s annual free concert. Rain fell in big drops, downtown, and orange cones blocked streets. EZ-Up tents flapped in the wind. We took our seats in the St. Francis Auditorium, its doors thrown open, its ushers smiling, not collecting tickets. I felt that strange unreality of the long-awaited event, that particular detachment in place of the excitement you think you’ll feel; and as so often happens, I also realized that despite waiting all summer, somehow I wasn’t ready for the following day’s delivery. I would have to get up early and mix a little cement to level out the pad; I would have to disassemble all my shelving to clear the way for the forklift. “Welcome to the annual Indian Market concert,” the promoter said as the applause died down. He hoped we would enjoy the program, and make a contribution; this was the annual free concert, he reminded us, and everybody was welcome. We clapped. A pianist appeared, Russian-born Natasha Peremski, dazzling and young, beautiful, confidently tearing into the dense textures of a Prokofiev sonata. Everyone was enraptured, and the sounds of the street suddenly seemed far away as attention focused on the booming grand piano before us. A man in the very front row clapped loudly between movements—a real faux pas—finally, at the end of the piece, we all cheered and clapped. We stood up. I could see the man in the front row—he had scraggly hair and a backpack—he shouted and called out to Peremski, who gleamed back at him before taking a second bow, her delicate fingers reaching for the black piano, curls of blonde hair falling from a smooth white shoulder. The man in the front row leaned forward onto the stage and reached for her—his skin was the deep, dirty bronze of a homeless person. Security personnel appeared in the isles, but intermission began and we all flooded out. “Who is that woman?!” I heard the homeless man shout as he strutted down the isle.
We stopped for gas on the way home at the truck stop near our house. “Wait,” I said as we pulled away from the pump— “let’s take a look at what’s on the flatbed.” A row of eighteen-wheelers had formed at the edge of the lot, their engines rumbling. I saw tractor tires, cast cement pieces, cartons; and there, in the middle of the load on one truck, under straps and inside a wooden crate, was the cool metal form of the Geil kiln.
A week later, with installation completed, after the first firing I was so excited my stomach was in a knot. I woke up at 3 in the morning, hoping the kiln had cooled enough to look inside. I was afraid, still expecting Fate to intervene and make something else bad happen. But the firing had gone okay. I stood in front of the open kiln door for a moment, hearing the glazes ping, then flicked off the flashlight and closed the door. The pots were good. Relieved, I walked back toward the house, pausing for a moment to look up at the star-filled sky. There was the moon, blood-red and shadowy, just over the roof. My son had told me there’d be an eclipse, and there it was—the moon was just a rind of orange with an ominous shadow cutting across it. The shadow of the earth. Beautiful, but strange. I know it’s a lucky thing when you get a chance to see an eclipse, but as I stood and looked up at this one, I could see why eclipses are also a bad luck sign. It seemed like a real harbinger of doom, this collision of shadows with its dusky, unnatural color, with its knife-shaped curve—the natural forces were definitely off-kilter.
A kiln has always seemed to me to be an astral object of some kind, a little chamber in which the heat and fury of a star is trapped. Maybe it will always be associated for me with this shadow of Fate, this ominous signal that the usual course of things has been altered; even when time goes by and this new kiln becomes part of a new approach to making pots, it’s possible that I’ll still open its door feeling fear. Probably I’ll still feel that I’m meddling with nature, when I use it. This was the fear I felt back in January when I faltered, backing away from my own career, trying to take a safer route. Art is alteration; it is a defiance of nature. It is an interruption of the natural, the usual. It’s stealing, in a way, making art, even though you have to pay top-dollar for the chance to do it. So maybe the eclipse, that blood-red message I saw after swinging the door open on my first load from the new kiln, was a good sign. It was Fate, smiling on me.
Theo Helmstadter
Chimayo, New Mexico, 2007
