What's in the price of handmade ceramics
The process…
So how do you turn a bag of clay into a cup or a bowl, and why are plates more expensive? What price is fair? I’m going to break it down so this post is going to be a long one.
Let’s just start with the basics. Everyone has seen the movie Ghost. Well, just like the movie, you have a piece of clay spinning extremely fast and you are trying with all your might to hold it down and control said piece of clay. The bigger the piece of clay, the harder to control of course. The really small ones can get you too.
But we have to take a few steps back. Before you even touch the wheel, you have to wedge (like kneading dough) your clay. I started off doing the little rams head, one little ball of clay at a time. Time consuming, yes! Over months of practicing I can now disgracefully do a spiral wedge. Whats the difference, I can wedge more clay in a shorter amount of time.
Over time, I’ve got a good idea of how much clay I’m going to need to make a cup vs a plate or even a platter. Depending on the surface area I need at the bottom of the piece, I’ll need to factor in extra clay that gets trimmed off or left behind.
I’m not going to go in to detail of how to throw, its better if you youtube a video anyways, but in short, you slap the clay (and I really mean it, you throw the piece of clay, as close to the middle as possible with a loud thud to get it sticking) on the wheel, you centre, then open, pulling the walls up, trim what you can off the bottom without distorting the cup, slice it off and put it aside to dry until it is leather hard (holds its form but still soft enough to cut into, usually when the clay is no longer sticky to touch but not too dry and cool to touch. yep, fine line!). The clay has absorbed a lot more water when thrown compared to hand building so there's a little more waiting time and one more step before the kiln.
Winter can slow down the drying time for clay, and I mean slow, could take even a day or two, but that's not a bad thing. Clay shrinks when it dries. If it dries too quickly, it creates tension and cracks. Cold temperatures, or covering them with plastic ensures the clay dries evenly inside and out.
Plates tend to crack more often and you need to throw them on a batt (a wooden board).The surface area at the bottom of a plate is much larger, lifting the plate off the wheel directly its nearly impossible and will most certainly warp. With cups, the clay is compressed between your fingers, but with plates, it's between your fingers and the batt below. If it is not compressed well, very obvious structural cracks appear. (pictured below)
As the clay dries and shrinks, around 12-15% depending on the clay, it shrinks in a downward and inward motion. 90degree angled corners on plates are more at risk of splitting. How to combat that? Sure skill and experience matters, but you also just have to factor in these faults, and always make extra.
Once it is leather hard, you flip the piece upside down and trim away all the stuff you don’t want. Revealing the final shape of the piece. Once that’s done, the piece has to dry further. If there's still water trapped inside, the water molecules expand to become gas and again that’s when we have cracks if not explosions of work.
First fire is at 1000c, so no I can’t just use the oven in the kitchen. Once the kiln reaches the desired temperature, you must let the kiln temperature naturally drop to room temperature before you open the door to avoid temperature shocking the pieces. if you open too early the pieces inside could crack and break. First fire can take 2 days to cool and Glaze firing up to 3 days.
By now, a week has probably passed and you haven’t even glazed yet. Glazing is the process where you add an over all coat and/or colour on to the pieces to make it water proof and food safe. The glazed pieces now head back into the kiln for a second fire at around 1200c.
A plate or a cup could look completely fine up until this final stage and crack. Its just the nature of ceramics. When I say crack, sometimes its a small one at the bottom of the cup, but you can technically still use it, as in it still holds water and it won’t leak, or a significant one where it can only go in the bin. Once you fire it the first time, it sadly can’t be recycled.
If you’re lucky, this whole process could take about a week or two. But no one fires just one thing in a kiln. Theres a lot of patience required in ceramics. As they say, wait quickly. If it takes almost an hour in total per piece to make, plus materials, and considering everything above, all the love and attention poured into it, how much do you think it’s worth?
Maggie