OK!! In the first part of this adventure I explained the circumstances leading up to the class itself. I show up on the first day and Brian hands out the 30 page syllabus, introductions are made, and he explains the studio ground rules. Of course, they all know each other and the rules, so, this is for me, which is good because of my encounter with that senior ceramic student, I want to not give them a reason to give me a hard time.
The class had the junior class, the senior class, and the two non-traditional students. He goes around the room kind of going through the syllabus telling the seniors and the juniors their term assignments and what is expected of them. He gets to the two of us and announces that we are the two “technicians” for the semester and we aren’t going to be making work, we are going to do glaze tests.
I envisioned myself making huge pieces, utilizing my space. Brian gave me a nice big space to work in. So, now I’m told I can’t make work, I can only do glaze tests. It’s a little bit of a shocker, but, my good friend Tim had been telling me all along that I should be doing cone 6 electric kiln tests because I am never going to have a high fire soda kiln and that I would be better off getting a new computer controlled kiln and I should be making cone 6 pots. This did make a lot of sense because along with soda firing being the hot thing in clay, cone 6 oxidation is even hotter.
When I started doing clay, all the experimenting was in Raku. Now all the cutting edge experimentation is with electric kiln firing. People are getting amazing results by controlling the rate of cooling, which one can do in these new kilns. So, even though this is not what I wanted to do, at first, I embraced the idea. After all, I could use all the raw materials, fire the test tiles, learn all about this, and pay a small $100 lab fee. So far, so good.
I should tell you all that I had never done any electric kiln firings. I didn’t know anything about the glazes, the raw materials, what the colorants did, or how to program the kiln to get the results I wanted. I didn’t even know what I wanted except that I wanted to create surfaces that no one else gets, like my Raku pots.
Everyone has to create a “contract” specifically explaining what they wanted to achieve in the class. I had no idea what I wanted to achieve, so, I wrote a very non specific contract. I jokingly called my contract “Cone 6 electric 101”. How does one know what they want to do, when, they haven’t done it before?
I had been to a couple of famous potters studios where is just so happens they had switched to cone 6 electric firing from cone 9 reduction. Tom Turner was getting the same results with copper red glazes, in oxidation, that for 1400 years was only possible in a high fire reduction kiln. I thought that maybe I would try to get the same look, colors and textures, in oxidation, that I got in Raku. However, as I said, I had no idea how to get anything. So, my contract was vague. I wanted to try everything.
There are thousands of cone 6 electric recipes. So, I thought I would take some of these recipes, mix small batches, put them on test tiles, fire them and analyze the results. This is what I, happily, started doing. This is not the traditional, start from the beginning approach that a student would do who was learning what every material did when fired. I didn’t want to start from the beginning. Without getting into it deeply, this was not exactly what Professor Kakas wanted from me.
He wanted me to be more specific, more narrowly directed. I knew what I was doing. I took a couple of shiny glazes, a couple of semi-matte glazes, a couple of matte glazes, a few specialty glazes, like red, which is the hardest to get right. He kept giving me my contract back for further revision telling me it was too vague. I would make a couple of revisions, hand it back, and we would go through this all over again. I had over 100 tests where I varied the percentage of colorants before my first firing.
I had only done 1 line blend, which is what one does when testing colorants. A line blend uses 2 colorants, let’s say copper and cobalt and you mix 100 gram batches in incremental amounts. There are 22 test batches in a line blend. When you use 3 colorants, it is called a triaxial. Triaxials have 21 test batches. I admit that I didn’t want to do that much work. I took some shortcuts. I only did one line blend and no triaxials. I, also, layered one glaze over another to make it look like I was doing way more work than I actually did. Hey, at first it took me 6 hours to mix 11 test batches.
As I said, I mixed over 100 batches which took long enough, let alone the hundreds I could have mixed. I met with him just before my first firing and after telling him that I mixed 10 different glazes and didn’t do many line blends he was telling me I was all over the place. I had to be more directed and that I was the only one that hadn’t gotten my contract approved by him. Btw, we were into week 5 at the time.
As a parting shot to our meeting he wanted me to document every test tile. That alone took a day and a half to write out, but, hey, that is what I liked to do. We are all required to do 3 presentations during the year, some to the whole class, some just to the professor.
I met with him on Monday, fired the test tiles on Tuesday and made my presentation on Thursday. I killed it. My tests came out great, better than I thought and I documented everything on paper. I had posted pics of my results on my FB page and had even gotten a thumbs up from the reigning glaze expert in the field John Britt, who is a friend. Brian had mentioned John Britt many times to the class and his books were on the recommended buy list. He asked me again how many different glazes I had mixed and when I reminded him that I had mixed 10 different glazes. I thought it funny that on Monday he said 10 were way to many and on Thursday 10 was “about the right amount”.
Meanwhile, we met twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thursday featured a round table discussion where students were required to bring in an article about some potter we had read about and had influenced us. This was to familiarize the graduating students with the potters in the field. I didn’t think it applied to me because I knew a lot of potters and I do a lot of reading. So, I do this as a matter of course.
Everyone gives there presentation and he gets around to me. I have nothing prepared but I quickly find someone on the internet who’s work I have respected for years, most of them I know personally, and give a little talk showing their work from internet pics. I began to call Thursday’s “show and tell”. I find this to be affectionately funny.
They all think I am disrespecting the professor, which, is starting to become a constant theme. In one session, one of the girls, the one who I had the run in, in the summer, brings in a U-Tube video of a robot making a pot from start to finish, including glazing. They all think this is really cool. I am abhorred by the idea that “art” was being made by a machine. When I went to school no student would consider this “cool”.
I explain to them that they should be all against this. I pointed out that this kind of thing was going to put them out of business. Even if they designed, and programmed the object some Asian firm was going to steal the design, make it for pennies in their high end machines, sell the objects in Europe and they won’t see a penny of their efforts. They all looked at me as if I was Charles Manson. Two days later, Brian, interrupts my glaze testing to watch a demonstration. It turns out that NMU has one of these machines and a whole degree art major dedicated to computers making objects. It is one of the most popular degree disciplines in the art department. I thought I was Rip Van Winkle and had just woken up to find the world a different place.
Another thing that was occurring was that during these Thursdays, traditional potter issues would be discussed. I would always add my two cents, but, most of the students would say nothing. When we had these discussions back when I went to school, they would be knock down drag out fights, where we would all be passionate. It’s so different with these students.
I spent most of my time in the glaze room. I had the habit of dipping my test tiles in a batch and bring them out to my space. I watched where I was going to avoid getting anywhere near the girls. I had been leery that the senior girls, who were very clickish, there were 4 of them who hung out together, worked in the same area, and only talked to each other, were going to pull something on me during the semester. I was 2 steps ahead of them and had cultivated my own click of girls who were excluded from their click.
Once when I was loading a kiln, this Jamie girl, who I had gotten into it with, was standing over me waiting for me to screw up so she could exert her alleged authority over me. I told her to get the fuck away from me, that I had loaded more kilns than she will do in her lifetime and I knew what I was doing. Surprisingly, many of the girls in the pottery studio liked that because she had bullied them in the past. I hate bullies. So, I made sure I didn’t do anything inappropriate that would give them cause.
I was just there to do my research. I did know how to navigate land mines.
Another thing I would do is compliment a student on what they were working on if I thought the piece was good. Brian comes to me in the glaze room and tells me not to offer any compliments. They think I am hitting on them, or, interrupting them or something that wasn’t clear to me. I was just paying compliments and giving encouragement. Then he comes to me and tells me I am dominating the discussions and that I am undermining the class. I told him I would try not to do that anymore and apologized, but I thinking I have no idea what he’s talking about.
I can’t help it that they can’t get past their boyfriends, FB, texting, and their mindless music. I spent more time than any of them in the clay studio, so I know that most, if not all the junior and senior students are hardly working. When I was there, you had to reserve a kiln two weeks in advance, to get one because there was so much work being produced. As I said, I work in the glaze room away from these students. There was very little interaction except for the two girls who were also doing glaze tests and we got along fine. If I was going to hit on anyone it would have been one of the two girls that I spent hours next to in a small space. One of them remarked once that the female ceramic students were in the wrong class. They should have been theater majors because they were drama queens.
Through all this I am tiptoeing around the land mines, learning about cone 6 firing and getting things done, trying to not make waves. We are through week 8 and there is only a few weeks left. The actual work ends at week 12 because the rest of time is reserved for final firings and final presentations. After that confrontation with Professor Kakas, things seemed to be getting better.
I “contributed” less in class and just ignored everyone except the few I trusted who had increasingly come to me to help them with a clay or glaze problem that they had. One woman, who loved my glazes, started using them on her pots which was good because it was hard for me to fill a whole kiln with glaze tests. So, things were settling down, or so I thought. One of my girls comes up to me and says that the 4 girls were trying to get me kicked out of the class. They said that Brian had put them up to it. The girls had a petition that they were trying to get everyone to sign. Most of them refused to sign it. They were adamant that what I was accused of was a big lie. I paid no attention to what they were doing. I thought it was a joke, until…………. I got a phone call from the Dean of Students to come in the next day for a meeting.
I need a break. I will finish this either today or tomorrow. To be continued………..
