Developing glazes…
…and woodfiring
Workshop with Markus Böhm at the International Ceramics Studio Kecskemet, Hungary 8th to 15th May 2014
Developing your own glazes can be efficient and fun. But in many potteries and studios it isn't. Often the lessons at school about glaze calculation repelled the later ceramicists for a lifetime. And mostly the teacher forgot to do the most important thing: explaining what a Seeger formula could be used for. Nevertheless Glazes are a very important part of most ceramic pieces. They are providing a »skin« which is substantial for the attractiveness of a pot or sculpture and often decides about the economical success or failure of a potter. With the right tools and organisation glaze research can be done successfully in a relatively short time and with defensible effort.
Markus Böhm is fascinated by glazes for as long as 30 years. Although he fires his pots in a woodfired kiln all of his work is glazed in addition to the effects that wood ash, soda and salt are providing. In his workshop he will use stoneware glazes as examples, but many principles and procedures can be used also for other firing ranges, i.e. Raku or Earthenware.
The students will have the possibility to fire their own pieces and trials in a woodfired kiln.
The participants for this very interesting workshop came from the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Scotland and Hungary. Together we developed hundreds of glaze tests and fired them in Masakazu Kusakabes "Sasukenei"-kiln and in a gas kiln. Particularly we made Oribe, Temmoku and Ash glazes because that was the wish of the participants.
After we opened the kilns we found a lot of very useful and different glazes. In fact somebody who would start firing stoneware with wood or gas could directly start a production with the formulas and recipes which had been developed over three days. Unfortunately the glaze calculation software "Matrix" did not run very reliable under Windows. Me and the participants are waiting for a Mac-version, since the very useful functionality for calculating volumteric blendings is unique for Matrix - especially with currie grids and triaxial blends.
Many thanks to Abel Lakatos for the photos!
Pictures at the ICS facebook album - klick here
Pictures made at my last ICS workshop:
http://www.mueritzkeramik.de/english/workshops/past-workshops/icshu_workshop
And then there are the fantastic pictures made by Joris:
Glaze workshop in Hungary
