|
Nancy
Fuller
Firing
of the new kiln in November 2010
Since Nancy’s exhibition of pots
made in Shigaraki at the Harlequin, she has built an anagama (Japanese type wood-kiln) in rural Aberdeenshire with the
support of a Scottish Arts Council Creative Development Grant. The design for
this kiln was the result of research made during her year-long training in Shigaraki, Japan, with anagama master
Suzuki Shigeji, during which time she visited kilns extensively, observing
how they were loaded, fired and unloaded. From her observations and
conversations with local potters, she decided how she wanted her own kiln to
be.
Before building her kiln, she undertook a residency at the Anderson Ranch
Arts Center, US, again with support from the Scottish Arts Council, to study
with Karatsu potter Nakazato
Takashi. Nakazato fired Anderson Ranch's noborigama (multi-chamber climbing kiln),
firing the final chamber in cooling-reduction. Nancy was so taken with the
results from that firing that she decided to add an extra chamber to her kiln
which could be either fired separately or function simply as a sutema (fire playing space), to stabilize
the firing process.
Both this residency,
and her participation in the International Workshop of Ceramic Art in
Tokoname, has influenced her to experiment with alternative wood-firing
aesthetics to those she learned in Shigaraki. She feels these new firing
styles better suit the clays available to her here in the UK.
The work to be shown has been fired for four days with a mixture of split
pine and beech, reaching a maximum temperature of around 1200°C. All the clay bodies are her own blends.
|