A long read · Ceramics

Fire, slowly

A week inside a small pottery by the river, from a block of wet clay to the morning the kiln is opened.

Clay

The clay arrives on a Monday, in grey blocks wrapped in plastic, heavier than they look. Before anything else it has to be wedged: pressed, folded and turned on a slab of plaster until every pocket of air is gone and the block feels the same all the way through. It is slow, dull work, and nobody in the studio skips it.

An air bubble left in the clay will not show for days. It waits through the shaping and the drying, and then, in the heat of the kiln, it swells and splits the pot open from the inside. So the wedging goes on until the cut face of the block is smooth and even, like the inside of a loaf.

By noon there are twenty balls of clay on the shelf, each one weighed, each one the size of a large orange. They will be bowls by the evening.

The wheel

Throwing starts with centring. The ball is slapped onto the middle of the wheel, the wheel spins, and wet hands push the clay up into a cone and down again until it runs true, without the slightest wobble against the palm. A pot that starts off centre will stay off centre whatever happens next.

Then the thumbs go in, the floor of the bowl is opened, and the walls are drawn up in three or four slow pulls, each one thinner and taller. The trick is to stop a pull early. A wall pulled one time too many goes soft, folds over on itself, and the whole thing goes back into the bucket.

Every finished bowl is cut off the wheel with a wire and set on a board to rest. Twenty go up; seventeen are kept.

Drying

For two days the bowls dry under loose sheets of plastic, so that the rims, which are thin, do not dry faster than the feet, which are thick. When they are firm enough to hold but still soft enough to cut, they are turned upside down on the wheel and trimmed: a sharp loop of steel takes the extra clay off the base and carves the foot ring.

Then the plastic comes off. The grey turns pale, almost white, and the bowls shrink as they lose their water, about a tenth of their size. They are as fragile now as they will ever be; a careless thumb on a rim is enough to crack it.

The kiln

The first firing is gentle and goes on overnight, up to the heat at which clay stops being clay and becomes something that will never soften in water again. After it the bowls are pink and ring when they are tapped. They are dipped in glaze, a grey slurry that looks nothing like the colour it will turn into, and wiped clean at the foot so they will not stick to the shelves.

The second firing is the one everybody waits for. The kiln is packed with care, shelf by shelf, the bowls a finger apart, and the door is bricked up. For fourteen hours the temperature climbs, checked every half hour, until the cones of clay set on a shelf behind a spy hole bend over and tell the potters that the heat has done its work.

Then the burners go off and nothing can be done but wait. A kiln cooled too fast will craze every glaze inside it.

Opening

Two days later the bricks come out of the door one by one. The air inside is still warm. The grey glaze has turned into a deep celadon green, pooling darker in the hollows and thinning to a pale edge at every rim, and there is the small, glassy sound of glazes still cooling, a tick here and there like a clock.

Not every bowl makes it. One has a crack along its foot, one has stuck to its neighbour, one has a glaze that ran too far. The rest are lifted out, turned over in the light, and set in a line on the long table by the window, where they will wait for the market on Saturday.

The studio sweeps the kiln, orders more clay, and on Monday it all begins again.