Week 17 - Humbled Again
I wrapped up my 3rd semester at IUS with a super fun and experimental solo soda firing and a big ol’ fail that made me rethink everything I’m doing. A great end to the year, if you ask me.
The firing took 24 hours from piloting to shut down. It was incredibly uneven, which wasn’t a surprise, but I still felt pretty good about the pace of it all and the general end results. The weather was 50 degrees and rainy the whole time, which I loved. I took a great little nap on the kiln pad which rocked. I sprayed 3lb of soda ash dissolved in 2gallons of water in 3 separate sprays. The first I sprayed when the top hit cone 9, about 3 hours before I shut the kiln off. Then I sprayed again when cone 10 was down on top, and lastly when cone 9 was halfway down on the bottom (I know, terribly, terribly uneven, but the cone pack was also near the flue; I think the pieces on the fire box side of the floor definitely hit a full cone 9/soft cone 10. I also stoked a couple logs after every time I sprayed. I let the kiln soak for 30 minutes after my last spray and then shut it off, closed the damper to .5” and did a 1 hour down fire. Once I stoked all my logs, I sprayed ~2/3 gallon of plain water into the kiln to encourage some oxidation and crash cool it a couple hundred degrees. The kiln was in pretty heavy reduction from cone 08 up until when I shut it off.
I unbricked the kiln at 2am the following night after I got off work and was very devastated at my findings. My sculpture had tilted ~10 degrees away from the firebox, causing some nasty cracks all up one side. A goblet of mine had also tipped and fused to the lip of my mug and the monolith, but that damage was nothing compared to what happened to my sculpture. I didn’t sleep until 6 that night/morning, and then it was the day of critiques. I still hadn’t finished building the middle part of the sculpture, either, so needless to say, final crit day was very, very long. And then I went and bartended. But I made it through! And I learned a lot from the critique. I made a mistake asking my cohorts way too many questions about my work for the little time we had to discuss it (won’t do that again, lol), but I still got some really helpful feedback and advice for where to take my work moving forward. I’m excited to keep playing with stacking forms without the pressure of planning exactly how they’ll stack.
I’m really happy with this mug (one of the only functional things I made all semester…) and content with my goblet refires, too.
Overall, I really enjoyed participating in final critiques and celebrating the work of my cohorts. I’m so beyond grateful to be here making work alongside such awesome, hardworking artists. (: