Legacy Article - Ceramics

I'm holding a bowl, a handmade pottery bowl that's been touched by the fire. A ritual baptism, this encounter with the flame has carried the bowl from one world to the next, anointing its rim and softly sloping interior with ash melted to an almost translucent green. Outside, one side blushes, remembering the flame's fiery kiss.

For clay to become pottery, it must pass through a series of transformations, a series of tests. For its final test, it must pass through fire. The history of using wood to make that fire stretches back thousands of years. During a wood firing, ash floats through the kiln, landing on the exposed parts of the pots, finally melting into a glaze with lustrous depth.

In Alberta, many potters are choosing to fire with wood to have a chance to dance with the flame. John Chalke, one of Alberta's premier potters, has been building wood fire kilns and inviting the flame to dance for over 30 years. He thinks of his kiln just outside Calgary as being part of the landscape, part of the whole organic experience of forming clay into objects and transforming them with fire. Christian Barr and Enzien Kufeld are two potters living near Wildwood, Alberta. They have built three wood fire kilns. For Barr, wood firing is a spiritual process, and the kiln has a central role. "I build kilns and kiln sheds with the idea that they are ritual spaces," he says, "Places that celebrate our unity of body, mind, and spirit. These kilns belong to their place as though they have always been." For potter Tammy Parks-Legge, watching the kiln during a firing is totally enthralling. "The flames shoot out the chimney and the blowhole on the door of my kiln," she says, "I never get tired of the process."

Loading the kiln is critical to the wood firing process. Pots are carefully placed so pathways snake between them, inviting the flame to pass by. The flame leaves only clues, not answers, on the pots it touches. The kiln gives up its secrets reluctantly. The potter must figure out why the flame lingered here or sped past there, why so much ash landed here, and not there. "You unload everything the way it went in," says Carol Selfridge, one of Alberta's renowned established potters, "so you can see what happened, see the path of the flames." Many potters give some of their pieces multiple firings, building up the ash glaze, offering the flames more than one chance to dance over their pots.

During a wood firing, the kiln must be attended regularly. Wood firings last hours, more usually days. The kiln is warmed gradually, then the fire is built steadily, coaxed stick by stick and slab by slab to reach out through the kiln's chamber. During loading, temperature indicators called cones are placed throughout the kiln. Each cone is made to slump over at a certain temperature, showing the potter how hot the kiln is getting, how fast things are moving. Welder's glasses shield human eyes from the searing flames. The pots have no protection. Some flinch and crack as the flame comes near. Others are open to it, waiting for transfiguration.

For the potter on the outside, not quite knowing what's happening inside is part of the challenge, and the wonder, of firing with wood. "Wood firing teaches you humility," says Selfridge. Watching the shimmer of the glaze on a pot, pushing the right pieces of wood into the fire at the proper time and rate, influencing the amount of ash created and released by the fire, teasing the flame past the pots at the front to those waiting at the back, the potter and the kiln hold forth in a fiery debate. From Barr's perspective, the kiln holds the upper hand. He loves the merging of the planned with the happenstance, the illusion of his controlling the process, and the unforeseen he discovers in the finished pots.

"It's exhausting and rewarding at the same time," Enzien Kufeld says. "You can try to manipulate the flame on the piece and also even get an understanding of what may happen with the flame, but you never know for sure."

Tom McFall, executive director of the Alberta Craft Council, agrees. The Craft Council recently mounted a show featuring the wood fired work of 21 Alberta potters. McFall describes wood firing as the "extreme version" of working with clay because of the risks involved, and the energy the potter has to put into it.

"The technical difficulties are magnified over gas or electric firing," he says emphatically. "The length of the firing, the personalities of the custom built kilns (many potters build their own), and the role of chance all magnify the risks. There's a fine line between magnificence and disaster."

It's that fine line, that twinge signalling approaching danger, that attracts many potters to wood firing. It's a line that both the potters and the flames can cross. Bob Reimer, a potter working in Calgary, argues wood firing enhances rather than masks the subtleties of a carefully considered piece. Parks-Legge uses less decoration on pots she's putting in the wood fire kiln, leaving the flames a cleaner canvas for their work. For Carol and Richard Selfridge, wood firing is the final step in the layering of meaning and decoration that begins when they take up the clay for a new piece. Richard calls it the multiple gesture. "We don't plan everything ahead. We work right on the piece adding texture, design, colour," he says. "Then we consign it to the flames," Carol continues. "We give up control and let the kiln take over."

The relationship between the kiln and the potter, the give and take that has the potential to produce exceptional, ethereal work, characterizes the working lives of the established and emerging wood firing potters in Alberta, and their relationships with each other. They share techniques and glaze recipes. They fire together, sweating to feed the kiln, then musing over the results, trying to capture with words and understanding outside the kiln what has gone on inside it. "Firing with wood is a chance to collect people around you to share your kiln," says Chaike, "to share the experience of creating." The sense of community is strong here. "I would not stop wood firing if there was no community around us," says Kufeld. "But," she continues, "it would not be as rewarding."

Wood (pine and spruce) and soda fired bowls.

Alberta potters teach at Medalta in Medicine Hat, at the well-known Series at Red Deer College, and in other classes and studios all over Alberta. They welcome travelling potters into their homes, and nurture ideas given to them in the homes and by the kilns of other potters. They are part of an international community. Alberta potters have worked at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, for example, and are invited to workshops and conferences from British Columbia to Japan. The strength of the wood firing community in Alberta makes it a destination for established potters from around the world. In Hythe this summer, Yasuo Terada from Seto, Japan, returned to fire the kiln he built there just a couple of years ago.

If one community is the one they have with each other, another community is the one they share with the people who buy their work. Part of the appeal of wood fired work comes from appreciating a sophisticated technique that doesn't discriminate between a purely functional mug and a more sculptural piece: the fire baptizes them both with the same transforming embrace. Wood fired work can be full and sensuous with melted ash caught swelling in languid drips. It can be rough and pitted, the work of the ash and the flame accentuating the marks left by a grainy clay body, or the confident hand of the potter. "The layers are there for the buyer to see," says Carol Selfridge, "you can go into it as much or as little as you want." Marianne Scott, owner of Scott Gallery in Edmonton, finds the appeal of wood fired work comes from its earthy, natural qualities. "It feels like it comes out of nature," Scott says. "The clay, the wood, the wood smoke, the textures, people really respond to it."

Wood fired altered and sculpted "flames" vase.

Many of Alberta's wood firing potters are recognized internationally, and their work is in public and private collections around the world. The finest pieces of pottery wood fired here show a strength born of the vision of the potter and the power of the flame. Released from one to the other, radiant with the flame's embrace, they glow long after the heat of its touch has cooled. Wood fired pots have earned their strength. They have come through fire.