Jon Rawlings Pottery
  • HOME
  • How I Caught the Clay Bug
  • Gallery
    • Feb, 2012 - Feb, 2014
    • Mar, 2014 - Oct, 2014
    • Nov, 2014 - August 2016
    • Sept. 2016 -
  • Resources
  • Blog
  • Art Museums
    • Oriental Institute, Chicago
    • Art Institute of Chicago
    • Honolulu Museum of Art >
      • Chinese Ceramics
      • Japanese Ceramics
      • Korean Ceramics
      • Native American Ceramics
      • Islamic Ceramics
      • Contemporary Studio Ceramics
      • Other Ceramics
    • Hawaii State Art Museum
  • Contact Me

Workshop with Hsin Chuen Lin

1/16/2014

3 Comments

 
PictureHsin throwing a tea pot off the hump.
This past weekend I had the privilege of attending a workshop with Hsin Chuen Lin at HPG. Hsin (pronounced like "sin") may be familiar to many of you as the Taiwanese/American potter who has so many excellent videos on youtube. As soon as I started potting I went to youtube for help and soon found his videos to be the most helpful for me. 

Hsin gave demonstrations on a wide variety of topics, everything from spiral wedging to glazing techniques to making trimming tools from hacksaw blades, but most of his instruction was about wheelthrowing and altering thrown forms. It was great to see him working at the wheel, but it was especially important to ask him questions along the way, to have him stop and show us what he was doing and why.

I had an opportunity to speak with him at length about how he got into pottery and his life as a potter. Here are a few of the things he shared with me. He grew up in Taiwan and attended a Taiwanese university studying to be a mechanical engineer. Like so many other stories about potters that I've heard before, he decided to take a ceramics class and fell in love with it. He ended up majoring in ceramics and after graduation taught school for a few years. He decided to go to graduate school for his MFA, but since there were no MFA programs at that time in Taiwan, he chose to study at the University of Iowa. After Hsin and his wife graduated from Iowa, she took a job in California and he went with her. When he turned 50, after many years of teaching and making pots, he began to wonder "why am I here in this world," as he put it. He felt he'd developed techniques that would be useful to many people but needed a platform from which to communicate them. Soon a video of Susan Boyle singing on "Britain's Got Talent" went viral on youtube and caught his attention. Suddenly it clicked that he should make instructional videos on youtube that would communicate all that he'd learned over the course of decades of working with clay. And they have. Since 2010 when he posted his first video, his videos have had more than 1 million views.

At one point the two of us were wedging clay together at the wedging table and I asked him what potters have had the greatest influence on his work. I was surprised when he said  "Peter Voulkos and Don Reitz." He explained that his ceramic program in Taiwan had trained him well to make classically shaped vessels but during his MFA program he had the opportunity to take workshops with Voulkos and Reitz which changed his approach. Under their influence he began slashing and punching and cutting one vessel after another. In time he found a way to blend both influences and it helped me understand better why many of his finished pots look quite different than they do when they're fresh off the wheel. It was interesting to me that almost every time he made a classically shaped pot during a demo, he would end up altering it in some way that made it less "perfect."

PictureHsin making trimming tools from hacksaw blades.
Hsin is not just a great potter, he's also a masterful teacher. Here are a few things I learned. They may not seem like much, but they're refinements that have made a significant difference in my potting. First, he showed me how to curl the fingers of my left hand to move the clay from the bottom of the cylinder more efficiently. I've seen him explain this over and over again in his videos and I thought that's what I was doing, but I was really holding my fingers too flat against the clay. I was using the pads of my fingers, not the tips. He made me aware of how I was thinking too much about what I was doing with the knuckle of my right hand and not thinking enough about the fingertips of my left hand. If you aren't doing this, try to consciously curl your fingers and hold them steady as you're lifting the clay. You won't believe how much more clay you can move by just pressing your fingertips at a 90 degree angle into the clay. In fact, a few times I went overboard and moved too much at a time and thinned the wall so much I torqued the whole pot! Second, he showed me how to use the very tip of my fingers when I was closing in the top of a pot. I thought I was doing what he was doing, but again I was using the pads of my fingers which created too much drag and would often cause the clay near the top to deform. He showed me how the smallest point of pressure can move the most clay while at the same time creating less drag. Third, he showed me how to hold my left arm so it wouldn't lay down on the top of the cylinder. I was vaguely aware that I was doing this, but he showed me how to keep my elbow up so I wouldn't create more friction at the top of the cylinder. Fourth, I learned how to belly out a cylinder using just my curled fingers. I still used ribs inside and out to give the pot its final shape, but using my fingers until the very end gave me more control over the clay. I'd noticed many times that when I used ribs for all of the shaping that often I would push the clay out too quickly or expand the cylinder more than I intended. Fifth, he not only showed us how to make trimming tools out of hacksaw blades, he also showed us how to use them. I've seen him trim pots on youtube many times, but something clicked this time that I hadn't noticed before. Many times I get frustrated when I'm trimming pots because as I trim the clay with a loop tool it goes right back on the pot and sticks there, mucking things up the next time the pot spins around. I've used traditional Asian trimming tools like he uses, but he showed me that I was holding the tool incorrectly with the blade open toward the foot. Instead, he showed me how to hold it with the back of the tool facing the foot. Rather than the clay slicing off and laying back down on the clay, the clay curls up on the tool and flies away. I don't know why I hadn't seen this in his demos, but I hadn't. If you haven't tried this before, try it now. He also sharpens his trimming tool briefly on a stone before using it which makes it cut much more efficiently. 

In February I'm taking a workshop with Carol Gouthro, another great potter, and I'll let you know how that goes.

3 Comments

First Time Firing the Gas Kiln

1/13/2014

1 Comment

 
January marks the end of the second year that I've been working with clay. The highlight of this month has been learning how to fire the gas kiln at HPG. For more than a year I've been loading and firing the electric bisque kilns, but I'd never had a chance to learn how to fire the gas kiln. I'd asked Kenny Kicklighter, the head of the kiln team, if I could learn how to fire it and become part of the firing rotation, but he wanted to wait until he thought I was ready. Well, in December Kenny approached me and asked if I was ready to learn. Kenny is not only an accomplished potter, he also knows more about firing a kiln than anyone I know. For many years he's been studying how to fire the kilns at HPG. For instance, there are currently 7 people in the firing rotation, including Kenny. Each time they fire the gas kiln they put 18 cone packs in different parts of the kiln. When the firing is over, the cone packs are placed on a board that lists their position such as top front right and so forth. He takes pictures of each board and when looked at in sequence these pictures have given him a general pattern for how our kiln fires. I was asked to study these and to read Nils Lou's book The Art of Firing. I guess that Nils had actually come to HPG about 8 years ago as a consultant when HPG was having problems with their gas kiln. He not only made adjustments to the kiln that got it working better, he also gave personal instruction to Kenny and other members of the firing team on how to fire this particular kiln. The firing protocol that Kenny uses is right out of chapter four of Nils' book. I also read parts of Fred Olsen's The Kiln Book and found that to be quite helpful. As usual I visited youtube to see if there was any instruction on how to fire a gas kiln. I found a few videos, but the information isn't clearly presented and the video quality is poor.

We loaded the kiln on Saturday, January 4. My first impression is that loading the kiln is the most important thing about firing a kiln. There were three of us helping Kenny, and we spent more than four hours loading. Quite a bit of attention was given to making sure that pots with certain glazes were put in particular parts of the kiln. We have a downdraft kiln that fires hotter on the bottom (cone 11) than the top (cone 9) and fires hotter on the right side than the left side. If pots are placed in the wrong areas, their glazes will either not mature or they will run off the pot. So the first thing we did was to go through the pots on the shelves and organize them according to their glazes, especially looking for glazes like Amber Celadon and UH Blue that need to be placed in very specific parts of the kiln. In the case of these two glazes, they needed to go in the back near the top of the kiln where it was coolest. Some pieces with underglazes and no other glaze on top needed to go on the middle top shelf in the back where both the heat was relatively low and the reduction was low. Kenny also warned us that if part of a bowl is sticking out from a shelf in the path of the flame, it will become hotter than the rest of the bowl and will distort (I've had it happen to mine). We use Rod's Bod to make our cone packs, and the Rod's Bod shows that certain parts of the kiln reduce more heavily than others. Kenny also makes small bowls from Rod's Bod, an iron-rich clay, that he glazes on top with a clear celadon (no added iron) and places in different parts of the kiln. He breaks these open after the firing to check for black coring. While we want a good body reduction, we don't want to overdo it and jeopardize the structural integrity of our pieces. The configuration of the stacks was also taken into account as well as the distance between each stack. We left at least an inch of space below each shelf so the heat could pass through more easily. All of this was a revelation to me. When the kiln was fully loaded, the door closed, and the oxy probe in place, Kenny showed me how to light the burners. It was 6 pm.

We met the next morning of the 5th at 4:45 am. When we checked the oxy probe we found the temperature at about 1600 F. Throughout the day we followed Nils Lou's firing protocol and recorded our readings on a chart. Kenny showed me how to use the probe, how to use dampers, adjust the gas, read the cones, interpret the flames, observe the ware, start body reduction, shift to neutral firing, start glaze reduction, etc. I was taking notes and learning quite a bit. When cone 10 at the top was at 9 o'clock (and cone 11 was at 9 o'clock on the bottom), we shut off the gas and closed everything up so it would cool down as slowly as possible. It was almost 6 pm.

We opened the kiln on Thursday the 9th at 5 pm. As usual there was a crowd of potters helping unload, clean kiln shelves, put on more kiln wash, and hoping their pieces turned out well. I certainly looked at everything coming out of the kiln with different eyes than I had before. After the kiln was unloaded, Kenny said the one thing he would do differently next time would be to start the glaze reduction a little earlier at a slightly lower temperature. We had quite a few pieces with celadons and they didn't get as much color as Kenny wanted.

I'm glad I'm learning to fire a gas kiln and that Kenny is mentoring me. I'll be helping Kenny on each of his firings until he thinks I'm ready to do it on my own. He also encouraged me to help other firers so I can see how they do it which will help me progress more quickly. It's funny how much this has changed my perspective on the process of making pots. Before it was so easy to just glaze a pot, lay it on a shelf and show up for the kiln opening. It was like opening presents at Christmas! Now I have a much better idea of how much work is involved in the entire process of making pots and how much skill is required to fire a kiln well.
 
1 Comment

    Author

    I hope this blog will be encouraging to potters, especially beginning potters, and a source of helpful information and comment.

    Archives

    November 2021
    December 2019
    September 2019
    May 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    Categories

    All
    Amaco
    Black Mountain
    B-Mix With Grog
    Burnishing Pots
    Centering Clay
    Coleman Porcelain
    Empty Bowl Hawaii
    Fuming Pots
    Hawaii Potters Guild
    Ikebana Pots
    Juried Shows
    Making Pots Heavy Or Light
    Masonite Bats
    Mothers Day Pottery Sale
    Otto Heino
    Pit Fire
    Plastic Bats
    Porcelain Clay
    Pots And Plants Sale
    Soldate 60
    Stoneware Clay
    Terra Sig
    Throwing Clay Thick Or Thin

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly