This Month at Green River Pottery: February 2008
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
--Wallace Stevens
Siberia
…it’s mid-winter here at Green River Pottery—everything’s snowed under, frozen, buried. Wood smoke hangs in the air at dawn and dusk up and down the Santa Cruz river valley, sometimes the smell of sweet cedar and sometimes, downwind from our woodstove at least, the sour and heavy smoke of Siberian elm. This is an invader species that out-competes everything around, here in Northern New Mexico.
It is quiet. It should be the time of year for long days lost in the studio, yet I find that studio time must be as carefully planned, and as heavily guarded against interruption, as at any other season of the year.
January's firing, the first of the year, produced some great pieces —such as Winter Wind (home page) for which I purchased a bigger brush and applied blue-black stain over the white glaze in thick, dripping strokes—I must make more of these this month, jars with that heavy, globular shape. I had also mixed some new ash glazes for the firing, and the tests came out great. By adding porcelain clay, I’m trying for an ash glaze that will hang tight to the side of a piece, rather than melting and moving over it; I like those greenish runny ash glazes that form rivulets down the side of a vase, but that’s not what I’m after.
Nor am I after the thick, buttery surface an ash glaze can have when, I think, talc is added. Instead, I want to achieve that tight, shiny but dark surface that’s like ice over a stone. That lets you peer right into the color and texture of the form underneath. The glaze I want needs to be whitish-brown where thick, and a clear, shiny brown where thin. Two summers ago I cut down a thicket of Siberian elm to expand the parking lot behind the gallery; this winter the wood is seasoned. Not only does it burn poorly, requiring to be coaxed and cajoled before hissing into its reluctant orange flame, but the wood also produces a mountain of ash. I have to shovel the woodstove out twice as often, burning Siberian elm. The ash of this fast-growing invasive species, I guess, contains a high proportion of un-burnable stuff—silica, perhaps?
In the past I've never had the patience to keep track of what wood I've burned to produce the ash for my glazes—ponderosa pine mostly, but with a little of lots of other woods too—I've always just shoveled out whatever ash I had accumulated, cleaned it and mixed it up. But this month, I happen to know that the ash I used for these tests was exclusively Siberian elm. I have buckets and buckets of this heavy, almost sandy-seeming ash; I’ll have to keep track of it from now on, and explore the possibility that its composition is different enough to really change—really enhance—my ash glaze formulas.
