college journal - august 2021

My primary focus during this last stretch of the project has been mixing larger batches of Olson shino, Britt shino, and Hagi glazes, and then applying the three to my last batch of bisque pieces via dipping and pouring.

I dipped pieces by hand, holding them by the foot - but quickly found that, perhaps in part because of the thick consistency of the glazes, this often left the base of the chawan without glaze. I then experimented with dipping part of each form at a time, which worked better, but did mean that layers of glaze overlapped on the forms, meaning the thickness wasn’t uniform.

I then experimented with pouring the glazes on using a wooden ladle. Michaela suggested using the production-pottery method of applying to the interior of bowls in turn, so that by the time you finish doing so the glaze has dried on the earlier ones and you can then apply the glaze to their exterior.

In addition, prompted by a suggestion of Rob’s when discussing possibilities for this firing, I also tried out re-glazing pieces from the previous firing to see the effect of multiple layers of glaze. On many of these, I first added a layer of Botz grey engobe with the intention of at least somewhat obscuring the previous undesirable glaze surfaces and providing a cleaner background. It will be interesting to see how much this affects the colour of the glazes.

One issue that emerged with applying further glaze in this way was the fact that, as the pieces were no longer porous, drying took far longer - I decided to try using the heat gun to speed up the process, resulting in some really expressive cracked and fissured textures. I am unsure if this will survive the glaze firing, but hope they do.