Thursday, January 14, 2010

Raku Firing


I've been learning how to fire the raku kiln under the watchful eye of my good friend Junji. This week I invited another good friend, Brad Quartuccio, to come photograph the firing. Brad snapped quite a few shots with his various film cameras, but it will be a while before I get to see the results. The best of his digital photos are posted on his website, Random Precision Photo.

As with last time, experimentation was the order of the day. Junji made a bed of small twigs, one of sawdust and another of newspaper to rest the red-hot pots on. I put one on a solid block of ice, and immersed another in a foot-deep pile of snow. Two went into iron boxes filled with sawdust, and the final two were set on the bare concrete to cool. After a few minutes, I submerged each pot in a bucket of water to quickly cool them down for easy handling. For the second firing in a row, nothing cracked.

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