Public service article

I recently wrote an article for Pottery Making Illustrated on troubleshooting tone-production pitfalls in ocarinas, because any potter who has ever been stymied by a malfunctioning fipple deserves help. It's available online here. It's acoustically and musically serious, while simultaneously including lots of googly eyes.

The article had a word limit that I was already exceeding, so I left out my number one rule of ocarina making: 

Fipple ain't broke, don't fix it.

There you have it. Now go forth and make music.

Waiting for the kiln to cool: a poem

I unintentionally deleted an important Powerpoint file that I have spent hours and hours working on, and then in an effort to clear up space on my laptop, I emptied the Recycle Bin. I've tried assorted recovery suggestions, but it's gone, gone, gone.

Alas.

Losing the file made me realize how woefully disorganized my folders are, so I'm doing some housekeeping today.

Lo, I found a free-floating poem I wrote a while ago. It's now tucked safely into a folder where I may or may not ever find it again, so I'm putting it here, so it can live on da blog with assorted other poems. Pretty sure I had a melody in my brain for it, but that's deleted and emptied from my mental recycle bin, oh well.

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Waiting for the Kiln to Cool

Oh I’m waitin’ for the kiln to coo-oo-oo-ool;

Temp’s gotta drop first--I ain’t no fool!

I worked too long on chipmunks, vases, and cups!

To lift the lid now risks thermal-shock blow ups.

Well, I say that’s the case, but truth be told,

Sometimes impatient, feeling risky and bold,

Throwing caution to the wind, anti-erudite,

I peek inside the kiln above two hundred Fahrenheit!

And the pots, they go

            Ping,

                        Ping,

                                    Ping.

In the warm air of the

            Spring,

                        Spring,

                                    Spring,

So I shut the lid, and I

            Sing

                        Sing

                                    Sing

about waitin’ for the kiln to cool….

A step toward Wikipedia

Mathemalchemy now has its very own page in Wikipedia, thanks to the efforts of some of the Mathemalchemists and a Wikipedia editor. 

I am the copyright holder of one of the photos the authors want to include in the article, and Wikipedia has very specific rules about how copyright permission to use photos is granted--which is surely a sensible thing and prevents a lot of lawsuits. One of those rules is that the photograph has to have a URL on the interwebs. So I'm creating one by putting the photo right here:

Ta da! There are additional steps in this process, but this is the first one needed to get this ball rolling. Look for these two charming chipmunks on Wikipedia soon.

Finished herons

Herons are out of the kiln and perched on #8-32 threaded zinc-coated steel legs. I have a few things to revise for the next round, but I'm happy with how these turned out. They were sponge-glazed; spray-glazing will save time when I make more, but these birds were too tippy for that. (Note to self: legs and tail need to make a stable tripod!)

In an interesting reminder that physics is always at play in pottery, the bird necks twisted clockwise during firing. Given that the wheel was spinning counter-clockwise, the frictional force utilized to narrow the necks was clockwise--meaning the necks twisted further when fired, rather than untwisting. Someone told me years ago that teapot spouts can untwist when fired, so here's proof that that's actually a myth: they twist more, not less. (I get around the issue with teapot spouts by pulling the spouts in rather than collaring them in, but heron necks are a little too long for that.)

Zigzag height

Fresh from the kiln, the tallest zigzag pot I've ever thrown: almost 14" on the wheel, 12" fired. I used stiff clay on a dry day, and through some mysterious throwing technique that I wasn't aware of at the time, the form became taller when I stretched it out, rather than the usual shorter. I used only 4.5 pounds of clay, so the finished pot feels feather light.

Bird retrospective

In 2007, we took a trip to Vancouver Island. While we were waiting for the ferry in Port Angeles, Washington, we admired the huge cormorant statues by Duncan Yves McKiernan, and I wondered if I could make small versions of those elegant forms on the pottery wheel. When we got home, I gave it a try. I was five years into clay, and still pretty new to altering thrown forms. I ended up with a bunch of phallic abstract birds that looked like this:

(This was also before I learned how to photograph my work, and I thought a blue tablecloth would make a satisfactory backdrop for a formal shot. Oof.)

In the intervening years, I have made hundreds of chickens...

...and hundreds of penguins,...

...and learned a ton about clay and design and googly eyes.

Today I recalled those not-so-long-necked wheel-thrown-and-altered cormorants of yore, drew upon everything I've learned in the meantime about making wheel-thrown-and-altered chickens and penguins, and came up with a pair of dinosaurish herons.

These birds are standing on chopstick legs, but I'm thinking once they're fired, I'll make metal legs for them--or bribe my beloved engineer to make metal legs for them--and stick them in the garden.

Pi plate, test 2

Today I tested the second π plate, to make sure the survival of the first one wasn't a fluke.

First, I washed the π plate, because it had been sitting out in the dining room for two weeks holding sea monsters (see postscript) and collecting dust, because we're not as good at putting things away when pandemics preclude having company for dinner. Washing confirmed that this plate, like the other one, had not vitrified--i.e. the clay is still porous. The glazed top didn't seem to soak up any water, but the unglazed bottom did. I wiped the plate dry and let it sit on the counter for a few hours, but I assume it remained a little damp. 

I prepared a tart crust, put it in the plate, and stuck the plate in the freezer for an hour. 

While it was chilling, I prepared a really fine vanilla custard with six--count 'em, six--egg yolks.

I removed the chilled crust/plate from the freezer, put a piece of parchment paper on top of it, filled it with dry black beans (cuz who needs pie weights?), and put it back in the freezer while the oven preheated to 375^oF. Then I put the cold pie plate straight into the oven. 

Twenty minutes later, I took it out and lifted out the beans. That's how I learned that chilled dry black beans are excellent insulators. The bottom of the crust hadn't cooked thoroughly, so back into the oven it went, minus beans, for another 10 minutes. Ta da:

After letting the crust cool, I filled it with custard and topped it with fresh sliced strawberries.

The final step involved eating pie with E and S. The crust was delectably crisp.

Three non-breakages don't guarantee these plates won't crack, but I'm pretty comfortable describing them as "oven safe."

Postscript: There be monsters here.

GeekPots

In addition to making π plates, I also made a website for my pottery biz. I figured it was time for something more formal and more malleable than this blog and Facebook. Making the π plates was easier than making the website, if you don't count the 18 years I've been practicing making pots. It was supposed to be a serious site, but the chatty chickens had other ideas. Geekpots.com. Please check it out!

Pi plate

I have been meaning to make a π plate for years, and this spring I finally did. The plate includes about 800 digits--my favorite run of which is 999999--before spiraling off to infinity underneath the rim.

I'm generally wary of using pottery in the oven. S and I once had a beautiful hand-painted baking dish from Poland, and we followed all of the instructions for its use until it cracked in the oven. Typically, pottery should go into a cold oven and warm up as the oven does. That doesn't seem conducive to pie plates, since pie crusts usually go from the refrigerator or freezer straight into a hot oven, so the π plate remained unrealized. Then a student at Claymakers requested a class on pots for cooking, and the studio manager gave me a bag of thermal-shock resistant clay to test out in preparation for that. 

I made two test plates, and glazed them with the two glazes I have that usually show texture the best. One showed the digits well, and the other did not. This made it easy to decide which plate to sacrifice to thermal shock testing.

After the empty plate survived going straight into a hot oven, I made the best pie crust I've ever made, tucked it into the pie plate, stuck it in the fridge overnight, filled it with the best spinach, onion, and Gruyère quiche filling I've ever made (fresh whole spinach is key) and put it into a hot oven. It performed extremely well.  

We ran the plate through the dishwasher, and learned it clearly hadn't vitrified at the temperature I had fired it to (^6). Given that earthenware is likewise porous and often used for bakeware, I'm not particularly worried about that.

The next test will be to make a pie in the other π plate, to make sure the success of the first one wasn't a fluke. Then we'll have to eat the pie, to make sure it's OK--all in the name of research, of course.

Bubo pot

Someone at a show a few years back observed that my zigzag pots are very symmetric, so I finally did something about that:

The gall-infested vessel is at Claymakers through March 14.

Gallery show at Claymakers

I'm excited to join Roberta Wood for a two-person exhibit at Claymakers (705 Foster Street, Durham, NC). The show opened today and runs through March 14. It includes many of my "mathier" pots--Klein bottles, intersecting sliced tori, nested spheroids, and zigzag transformation vessels among them--along with Roberta's beautifully geometric sculptures. I think our work goes well together. Please stop by if you're in the area!

Gifts from the glaze bucket

My home pottery studio is on a screened-in porch, so anything that can be negatively affected by freezing temperatures--e.g. wax, bagged clay, glazes--usually gets moved to the basement by early November. Sometimes even the basement isn't warm enough to prevent problems like the one presented below: crystals that precipitate out of glazes, particularly glazes that contain lithium carbonate. Given all of the ingredients sharing this particular glaze bucket, I can't say for sure what lithium compound stars in the videos, but it sure is purty.



One more quick video, because the crystal shown therein is so perfect:

Light

Playing with light.

Orb on Flotone graduated background

Orb on newsprint

Newsprint on orb

Shino tests

I'm teaching a glazing class at Claymakers, and we're focusing on American carbon-trap shino glazes fired to cone 6-7 in Claymakers' gas kiln. Carbon trapping happens thanks to soda ash dissolved in the glazes. As a glazed pot dries, soda migrates to the surface and crystallizes. These crystals can bind with soot that's produced by the reduction (low oxygen) atmosphere in the kiln, yielding smoky grays and blacks, on top of the whites and oranges typical of shinos. Wax resist swooshed onto the drying glaze prevents crystals from forming where the wax is, but can also encourage crystal formation along the edges of the waxed areas.

Here are some of my pots from our first firing; we'll fire again next week.

Malcolm Davis Shino with 6% Redart. The swoosh and dots are from wax resist.
The glaze was thick, and the pot was in a heavily reduced spot in the kiln.

Three salt rocks: Dresang Shino, Malcolm's Shino w/Redart and Carbon Trap Shino.
The swooshes, dots, and squiggles are all thanks to wax resist.

Cadogan teapot (a lidless teapot that fills from underneath, like a salt rock
with a spout); Malcolm's Shino w/Redart, wax resist. The pot was next to the jar in
the kiln, so well reduced, but the glaze was thinner--thus not as intensely black.

A little Trout on a little chickarina

A little Trout on a little chickarina. This reasonably well-tempered bird has 4 holes and spans a minor 7th (sol-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa, plus a few chromatic pitches, courtesy of physics).

Pageant outcome

Enquiring minds can Google "Beaver Queen Pageant 2019" to learn how things panned out last Saturday. Adélie Pygoscelis-Beaver did not win the crown, but did win Best Talent for her reinterpretion of the pottery scene from Ghost as a polyamorous interspecies clay slip-smearing water-sprinkler-sprinkling fest. The scene starred Adélie Pygoscelis-Beaver as Demi Moore, Faser Beaver as Patrick Swayze, a waddle of Entouragettes who also wanted "to be in the room where it happened," and a bunch of children over whose heads all the innuendo flew and who were happy just to run through a sprinkler in a park on a hot day.

The State Presence question was "if you are in the room where it happens, what room are you in, and what's happening?" Adélie gave an impassioned call to action:

Penguins inhabit two worlds at once:
we whoosh through water, we waddle on land.
So you'll find me in two rooms at once,
both getting hotter, both threatened by Man.

Find me first in the Living Room,
the room where, to live, we must take a stand.
Find me next in the world's biggest room:
the Room for Improvement; wherefore I demand:

Penguins raise flippers! Beavers raise paws!
Humans raise hands to pass some new laws!
The first legislation we sign and seal
is a path toward renewal: a Green New Deal!
The next legislation: let hist'ry record
we sign ourselves back in the Paris Accord!

There's no room for doubt; there's no wriggle room.
Species unite! Save our planet from doom!
You want a revelation? I want a revolution!
To arms! RISE UP 'gainst climate change and pollution!

Several hundred Potters' Penguin Project penguins found forever homes, Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association raised ~$24,400, and I've reclaimed shelf space at home to fill up with my next community-building art project. All is good.

Pot shots

The Durham County Pottery Tour takes place every November, but we start planning in January. Photos were due last week. My work is kind of all over the place--I have my signature "zigzag" and "swoosh" pots, plus lots of functional ware, but also lots of work that doesn't really match anything else--yet is among my favorite stuff to make. It's challenging to pick Tour photos that capture the spread without looking like sprawl. Here's what I picked for this year:

1. Glazed, soda-fired zigzag teapot. Usually I leave these pots unglazed to show off the contrast between slip and clay body (in which case I'll typically weave a cane handle rather than adding a hand-built clay one). I like the wiggle of the spout on this pot, and that the diameter of the foot matches the diameter of the neck. There are also some nice glaze details, including melty reds and blacks amid the ochre.

2. Unglazed slip-on-bare-clay zigzag vases (both have liner glazes). I really enjoy making this type of pot, in part because they capture what I see as math and physics in my work. I cut (zigzag) or swipe (swoosh) patterns into slipped cylinders; these expand into organic designs as I stretch the pots from the inside. Friction torques vertical zigzags into spirals; parallel swooshes drift apart or scrunch together; and coarse canyons emerge between smooth-slipped plateaus. The transformations are different every time, functions of variables both within and beyond my control: initial patterns, depths of cuts, slopes of curves, plasticity of clay bodies, magnitude of expansion, and directional spin of the wheel.

Looking at this photo now, I'm realizing the graduated background is unevenly lit, which is embarrassing. Poor quality photographs don't flatter pots.

3. Candlesticks. Tons of fun to make, but not necessarily safe if you have cats. We keep these out of reach (theoretically) on our mantle, but our cats still manage to figure out how to knock them over. I can't sell the candlestick on the left because it's epoxied back together. Thanks, cats.

4. Chickarinas. Goofy, geeky, reasonably well-tempered tuned chicken whistles. These days I usually make four-hole chickarinas tuned to play two tetrachords (sol to do plus do to fa), which is just right for playing the melody of Schubert's Die Forelle. (Why do I play The Trout on chickens? Because I can.) I sell them with a fingering chart and a really good poem. They don't exactly coordinate with zigzag vases, but I fantasize that past customers will see the photo and remember to bring their chickarinas with them when they visit, now with a year of practice under their belts, so we can play chickarina duets.

JMM 2019

I'm delighted that this Klein bottle representation* found an appreciative audience at the 2019 Joint Mathematical Meetings (the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America) in Baltimore, where it won an award for "best textile, sculpture, or other medium." Hooray for clay! The gallery of exhibited art is here.

(*Since a Klein bottle has only one side, it can't actually have holes; those come from the artistic license of living in 3D.)

Happy Solstrice

Way back in 1991, when I was busy antagonizing my dad by shacking up with my German boyfriend in hippie Oregon, I mail-ordered a box of greeting cards from a progressive company that clearly couldn't afford to hire a proofreader. Sometimes typos etch a permanent place in one's memory. Thus on this joyful day, I quote:

Welcome the return of the light.

Happy Solstrice!

Dressing pots

The 4th annual Durham County Pottery Tour is this coming weekend (Nov. 4-5, 2017). This year, instead of buying cut flowers to dress up my pots, I went for assorted air plants. I didn't realize until googling them just now that they're Bromeliads; their forms and flowers suddenly make sense. I like how the plants and pots interact.