Great Barrington — The smoke emanating from a chimney in a structure behind the Daniel Arts Center at Bard College at Simon’s Rock on a recent Friday morning was not a breach of red flag fire bans, then in effect due to the recent heat and lack of moisture. In fact, interim Fire Chief James Mead had visited the site the day before to give his personal blessing to the school’s days-long process of firing pottery the old-fashioned way, with a real fire. “Just put a hose nearby,” he had suggested. The hose was not put to use, in the end, but many hands, patience, and creative thought were.
The standard modern way to turn clay into functional or decorative pottery is to use an electric kiln, heated to around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, or a gas- or propane-powered kiln that can be heated to somewhat higher temps. The Simon’s Rock instructors—Ceramics Professor Ben Krupka and visiting artist Harry Levenstein—and students heading up this month’s firing brought the flames up to nearly 2,400 degrees and kept their fire there, feeding it by hand in rotations, for about 30 hours before beginning the dayslong cooling process.
In the world of wood-fired pottery, the interesting stuff starts happening above 2,300 degrees. Color is created not by glazes applied ahead of time, but by the interaction between extremely hot fire and the surface of the clay. At the highest temperatures, the pots are, in Harry’s words, “glowing hot and starting to melt, and receptive to the organic matter that is whooshing in and around them.” There is charcoal, wood ash, hot gasses like potassium, the organic matter of the particular trees from which the wood was harvested. All those things, says Harry, “are etching themselves into the surfaces. The way the flame moves through the kiln is recorded along the surfaces of the pots.” The pieces closest to the fire are the most “dynamic” and those furthest away the most “quiet.”
I could read these stories myself, in the results from Ben and Harry’s firing of their own work the week before the students’ firing. Shiny orange versus dull brown was the difference between lengthy exposure to the fire and protection from it. Melting ash had dripped like droplets of paint width-wise down the sides of a pot that had been placed on its side in the kiln. A re-fired bowl (bowl fired for the second time) ended up looking lightly pocked all over. Another had a dotted green pattern that put me in mind of a painted turtle’s shell, and another of a peacock’s array of feathers.
Simon’s Rock’s brick kiln—which sort of resembles a locomotive—was built by Ben Krupka in 2008 with a friend and seven students. When I visited the kiln before and during this most recent student firing, about 100 student pieces were staged for loading atop folding tables, and they had been carefully placed in the exact positions in which they would soon be put on platforms in the kiln.
Placement is key to loading, and, in the words of Harry’s mentor, Simon Levin, “Loading is firing.” How’s that? “Because every pot you put in there is an aesthetic decision, depending on where you put it, and how you put it,” Harry explained. Each piece affects all the others. Students, in considering these placements, had been encouraged to consider the path that the fire would take; how pieces adjacent to theirs would impact that path; and how their piece’s distance from the fire would affect the fire’s path, and the subsequent impact on the surface of their piece.
This attentiveness to detail had started long before the loading and firing day, with considering the composition of the clay “bodies.” Harry comes up with his own recipes for his clay, buys the raw materials in powder form suppliers, and mixes the clay himself. He does this, he says, “in order to achieve certain color palettes. Based on how we fire, I can come back and test and develop clay bodies that react in ways that I find appealing.” Clay is usually a combination of several things you can alter, according to considerations such as “how plastic it is, how workable it is, how stretchable it is, how much it shrinks, how much particulate matter is in it, how much iron content does it have, how much silica, how much glass.”
For the initial loading process, Simons Rock students Zoe Coote and Zoey Johannes were crouched inside the kiln, working on the three-tiered set of pieces that would be closest to the fire. They were rolling “wads,” or tiny balls of wet clay, on the bottoms—or side, or top—of each piece to keep it from directly touching the platforms. Some pieces were imprinted with sea shells, which would later disintegrate in running water. Zoey Johannes had vases and plates to fire, and Zoe Coote’s preferred creation was a hollow, abstract object that might serve as a candle holder or simply a thing of beauty. Falcon Caligiuri-Randall had many pieces, including a long, ridged object that looked a bit like a starfish pulled into an accordion. Eleanor Petersen-Rockney had made a pitcher with shell mushrooms (made of clay) coming out of it.
There was a festive atmosphere at the kiln, with music playing, dogs running, everyone relaxed, and a focus on their common goal. “I’m living my best life right now,” said Zoey Johannes. What’s great about it? “I feel like this is something where I’d think, ‘This is really cool, I should do this.’ But I don’t think I would have ever done it. It’s an experience. I’m going to talk about this for years.” When I visited the following day, during the middle of the fire-tending stage, I suggested to student Falcon Caligiuri-Randall that it might get boring. “No. I think it’s relaxing, and fascinating,” they responded.
The transfer of the pieces from table into the kiln took the students all day, and, once the kiln was full, Ben and Harry carefully bricked up the entrance. They stuffed white silica insulation into every crevice and crack to keep any air from getting in and throwing off the temperature readings. At that point, with all the preparations complete, it was time to light the fire. The digital pyrometers that measure temperature are not very precise, so they had also placed sets of four pyrometric cones inside. These are made of ceramic materials that melt at different temperatures, whose collapse, one by one, will indicate when that temp has been reached. Students and teachers took shifts tending the fire, through the night, through the day, through the next night.
“We go very slow at the beginning, to not crack things,” explained Ben. “We keep it under 200 degrees for the first 3 or 4 hours, and go slow ’til around 1000 degrees. Once it passes that, you can go as fast you want to get to temperature, because you can’t hurt the pots at that point.” Once the kiln reached peak temperature, they held it there for between 20 and 24 hours, feeding it kindling. Cooling the kiln back down to 100 degrees—the point at which they could unbrick it and reveal what had taken place inside—took several days. Unloading might be preceded by a careful study of these revelations. Students and teachers might examine what the fire had done, why it had developed the colors the way it had, why it had made the marks it had made, why it had taken the path it took. All this information would to be applied to the next firing.
In the case of the end products of the students’ firing this time around, much of their work came out with a lovely green-gray sheen, punctuated, lined, and daubed with a brassy brown. Here was a quite lovely pig. Here was a pot now upright, that had been laid sidewise in the kiln, showing in a set of light green streaks the upward path that melting ash had taken. Here were Zoey’s plates. Here was Falcon’s abstract and fragile starfish accordion, looking fit to serve as a section of andiron for a queen’s hearth. Here was thoughtful intention and pure serendipity, resulting in unpredictable works of art.
It occurs to me that making pottery in a wood-fired kiln can be seen as the opposite of scrolling culture. As Zoe Coote put it, the work “[t]akes a community that cares about the same thing.” Wood-firing also hardly seems applicable to the usual rules of a college class. Not only is there no correct answer, but no one could possibly predict what the answer—the finished pot—will be. On one side of the equation is clay body composition + shape of object + position in the kiln + position and shape of the other objects nearby + organic matter of the wood + fire temperature + length of firing + amount of ash + length of cooling. On the other side? Who knows. All that’s for sure is, as Ben put it, “Everything impacts every other thing.”
Harry Levenstein came to Simon’s Rock in August, 2020 and has been invited to stay for the next academic year. His work can be found locally at Sett in Great Barrington, and various farmers’ markets. Ben Krupka has been the Ceramics Professor at Simon’s Rock since 2005.
