Canvas

150,000 per meter

Dropped Pin near Lubuk Baja Kota Lubuk Baja Batam, Riau Islands 29444 http://goo.gl/maps/qqcp2

Wood-firing with Visiting Artists

We undertook a wood firing at Telunas Beach with some visiting artists.  Tim is an American artist residing in Bangkok, and John came all the way from Europe.  John had recently built a wood-fired downdraft kiln, but hadn't yet fired it.  John and Tim both did a great job recording the event and Tim has graciously shared the photos below.

September 15, 2016

September 16, 2016

Visited in the morning by a Blue Carpenter Bee.

While John was stoking the kiln during the afternoon, Tim, Paul, and Supriyadi made trimming tools.   

The Finished Trimming Tools

Stoking the Kiln

Pulling out the Test Rings

September 17, 2016

While the kiln was cooling, John and Tim led a pit firing mini-workshop with some high school students visiting from an international school in Singapore.  Below is a pit-fired bottle that John made the day before from the Telunas clay.  

September 18, 2016

Unloading of the Kiln commenced in the afternoon.  

The pit fired pieces were retrieved as well.  

From Left (back row) John Lesondak, Paul Christensen, Tim Mills.
Front Row: Yan and Supriyadi

John with porcelain mug from wood friing.

From Left: Yan, John, Supriyadi.  Exchanging mugs.

Woodfired Tea Bowl by Tim Mills

September 19, 2016

The finished pieces are filled with water and left to sit for 24 hrs to check for leaks.  As it turned out, out of the 120 pieces, only about 10 had to be rejected.  This was one of the best firings we've had so far.

Woodfired mugs made by Paul, Supriyadi, and Yan

First Firing of New Kiln

This month was packed with lots of activity as we constructed a groundhog style kiln patterned after a design known as the "manabigama" kiln, made a kiln load full of pots and bricks, and fired the kiln.

Click on the embedded slideshow, or click on this link to see the photos detailing the entire construction process.

I designed the kiln hoping for something that would fire quickly so that we can have the opportunity to offer this as a potential activity for school groups in the future, as well as being fuel efficient as possible so in order to be more environmentally friendly than a kiln that would take several days to fire.  To this end, I think it was a success.  The kiln fired in twelve hours.  Below is a chart of the notes I took on the pyrometer readings throughout the firing process.

We pre-heated the kiln with a small fire in the firebox for about 12 hours, and then let it cool down overnight.  We did this because some of the pots and saggars loaded into the kiln were still leather hard - not even bone dry yet, and we wanted to make sure we safely dried them out before heating them up past the boiling point of water.

The steep cooling curve was a bit of an accidental experiment.  We left the air ports open on the firebox for a couple of hours and the kiln cooled dramatically faster than intended.  Despite cooling really quickly through the quartz inversion range at around 570 Celsius, none of the coffee mugs had cooling cracks.

Here are some of the finished pieces: