Penland's wood firing 3/27/09

The best part of a long firing is having lots of advisers, as well as lots of shifts of people loading the wood!

Greg, Mike, Rachael and Tai discuss how the temperatures vary in the different chambers.

Tai is about to close these openings with some kiln-shelves as well as the bricks.

Rachael, Yena, Ethan and Tai...looking up the hill from the bottom chamber.

The main port for feeding wood into the fire chamber...lots of wood!

After each stoking, there would be black smoke coming out the kiln through some holes (left open on purpose)...but most of the smoke went up the chimney! The fire chamber is on the left, with 2 humps of main chambers full of pots going up the hill toward the chimney.

Behind the observers is "The Pines" dining hall.

Bill checks the cones in one of the side "peeps".

Lots of sitting around while the kiln slowly rises in temperature. This shows the top chamber, and the "secret chamber" that leads into the chimney.

Susan seems excited about something while nothing phases Mike.

Tai is pulling out some shorter wood, with the meadow in the background showing the day-long rain. (I don't think they call it a meadow...but maybe)

Yena, Greg and Tai have a moment's discussion.

Checking on the dampers at the foot of the chimney...Rachael, Bill and Tai.

McKinsey was outside checking on the chimney smoke after each stoking with wood. This became a pretty wet part of the day with rain almost constant.

Pitcher-maker Greg has a couple of finished pieces...and

he's still throwing a few more.

Thanks everyone for letting me watch an eventful day at a great craft school!

Energy Xchange and Spring cometh

Here are some crafts-people at work, some cows doing what they do best, and some flowers and buds saying it's spring at different elevations here in Western NC.

Ian Kessler-Gowell gave us senior visitors a great demo of glass blowing...

Including the full process from beginning to breaking...unfortunately. It was a nice piece until he clipped it from the "stick that you blow through" which must have a name...and it tilted and he was actually juggling it but made sure not to use his hands, just his tools...and then it didn't bounce when it hit the concrete...and some of the shards hit one of the women's suede boots which started to smoke...but she shook them off!

In the pottery studio... are some of the pottery pieces by Ross Edwards, who wasn't there last Fri. when we toured. He uses plaster molds to make similar shaped pieces. The glass furnaces and the glaze kiln are run totally on the methane recovered from the 9 acre landfill near Burnsville...a great model of using the unrecovered gas that exists abundantly in all our landfills!

This is the early spring look that I have around my home...just the beginning of red maples giving a little color last week.

And our local forsythia was just beginning to blossom at the elevation where I live.

On Hwy 80 north leaving Burnsville, we found some lovely white cows, which apparently are special to someone! They seemed pretty placid!

Here Lindsay Rogers (no relation that I know of) is making handles for some mugs in her studio area. There are other potters and another glass blower in the 2 studios.

I ran out of juice in my camera batteries, so didn't get pics of the fish and aquaculture gardens, nor the little gallery.

In Burnsville there was a dogwood (I think) just about to burst.

This daffodil lives by Lake Tomahawk in Black Mountain, where the warm water and the sun have pushed spring to already be there.

While in my yard, I think these little guys may be some mini-daffodils. They may never open, since we've had some freezing nights lately.

We were glad to eat inside rather than on the patio at the Garden Deli in Burnsville. The bright sun didn't quite warm up the cold mountain air.

These lovely quilt squares hang in various areas throughout Burnsville.

And this lovely trump l'oeil mural is right on the square in the middle of town. We all admired it... "We" being the 15 folks who visited Burnsville and the Energy Xchange with the Black Mountain recreaction deptartment "van clan". Thanks for doing the driving, Renee!

We drove around the square, seeing the court house, some offices and shops, and the lovely historic hotel "New Wray" for which I still have trouble remembering the name.

Today (Sat) I went with some other women from my church to join the women of the UU Church of Asheville for a lovely breakfast/brunch. I met a nice woman who works with International Link and I volunteered to help teach some people English as a second language. So I'll be going to a mini-training for their programs in a week or so. It was great to finally get to see the Asheville church, and meet some of the women from it. I have been somewhat shy of walking into such a big church, after becoming so comfortable with the little one here in Black Mountain. But now I won't feel so lost.

The other big event this week was receiving a picture from my sister of herself and her new kitten. I was so glad that she felt like sending it, but I must say I thought she was clinging to what she looked like in her 30's...rather than growing into her age gracefully. But it was just one picture. Maybe she doesn't wear all that makeup every day. For me, comfort takes the first choice in my looks.

comments are welcome! If you can't post them here, write me at goddessinclay@gmail.com.

Beautiful pottery/sculptures

Here are some more of the pots that are in the Mezo-American exhibit at the Mint Museum in Charlotte.

I liked these polychrome paintings on huge platters. And if I remember my Art History correctly, the indigenous people in the America didn't have potter's wheels until the Spaniards arrived. So my guess is these were coil built. SOrry I didn't copy the blurb under them, but it didn't say how they were constructed or painted anyway.

Warning! This is gorey as any movie could be...and it's in a museum. I can only say, when you get to looking at the figure, it sure doesn't look like the description. (Figure is after description, so you can skip the reading if you want).

Again, the description comes first...

Isn't it great to see a woman holding a child, with red paint on them? Before the Christians even arrived and turned every female that was honored in art into Mary?

Next there are a couple of Mayan gods/goddesses on a cup. I take issue with the description of what the old god is doing to honor the moon goddess. Perhaps the cup was formed for priests/priestesses to laugh over when drinking their morning cuppa. But to me if you're going to the trouble of drawing your dieties on cups, they probably would be doing a ritual, giving homage to those great goddess breasts. Just my interpretation.

That's all I have time to download today...there are still some more early American Women Potters works I want to share. I must admit, I skipped the early craftspeople who just made jugs and bottles which are kind of 'nondescript' and only took pictures of what I liked.

Ceramics of and by women - pioneers in the field

The joy I found in this pot, was its imperfection that had been turned into a masterpiece...like many of the pots from the hands of the community members in my dear studio here in Black Mountain.

Kate Sears has her pot sitting next to the only one by Adelaide Alsop Robineau at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. I'll talk more about Robineau later.

I love the simplicity of this design. Many of the pots that are decorated so beautifully were apparently "blanks" that women would paint upon, rather than actually throwing the pots themselves. It wasn't clear on most of the ones I saw whether this had happened or not. Perhaps that's why the term "decorator" is used next to Naomi Walch's here.

In Art School in the 1980's I had trouble finding early ceramists who were women in Art History books and periodicals. Most of those I found were considered women hobbyists, who had nothing better to do than learn how to paint ceramics, as an alternative to doing various kinds of sewing. They often were extremely skilled, but the Art Community (those who use a capital letter on the word Art, didn't think much of them. I kept digging, and finally found that there were many talented women creating new glazes, sculpting, carving pottery and experimenting (often alongside their husbands and children) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Fanny Levine, Decorator, "Bowl with Geese" 1914, earthenware. (Saturday Evening Girls)

Saturday Evening Girls Pottery was a part of a settlement house program for young immigrant women in Boston. Decorating pottery was not only a diversion for these young women, but also provided them with a means of support at a time when jobs for women were limited.

Most of the American pottery displayed at the museum was earthenware, but this was one piece that is stoneware, circa 1915-1925, from the Fulper Pottery (1814-1955) in NJ.

This is one of the ceramics periodicals started by women. Edith Harwell is depicted on the cover in her Mint Museum Art Studio in 1936. In 1931 she set up a pottery at her home near Charlotte, NC, named Pinewood Pottery.

Soon after, the museum asked her to demonstrate pottery making, and she moved her studio into the basement of the museum. She remained with the museum until 1938 when she and her husband moved to Fairhope, AL.

Thelma Frazier Winter (1903-1977) studied at Cleveland Institute of Art and later taught there and in the Cleveland public schools. "Dancing Figures" was created around 1945. She was the first prize winner for another sculpture in the Ceramic National, an annual exhibition founded in 1932 in honor of Adelaide Alsop Robineau. This was the first time the prize was awarded to a woman.

This Tulip Form Vase (earthenware) was created (circa 1905-15) by Fernand Moreau, Designer, at TECO, (1887-1930) in Terra Cotta, IL

But since I was also looking for the Goddess in Clay...here are some of the MezoAmerican sculptures, pots and figures the museum exhibited.

This Peruvian figure is actually carved in volcanic stone. To me it looks like any mother of twins, who should be immortalized as a goddess! The museum has some interesting definitions of female figures holding infants...suggesting they are representative of ancestors holding newly chosen leaders.

OK...here is the piece I came to see. Robineau also was known for developing many great glazes, experimenting in her pottery, as well as carving in porcelain. This piece was finished late in her life, and isn't as fine as many I've seen in other museum catalogs. She's best known for her scarab vase, which I think is at the Metropolitan Museum in NY. I was truly inspired by her rich flowing glazes (which even puddled on the kiln shelves) because they made glass look like watercolors.

This is a tiny piece of her work...but exquisite still.

Another thing Robineau did was publish a periodical "Keramic Studio" in Syracuse NY.

She started this magazine to provide advice on china painting. When that medium failed to gain respect in the artistic community, she advised her readers to become potters. She heeded her own advice, becoming the first woman to learn the potter's wheel and launch a career as a studio potter.

This Seated Female Figure is from Costa Rica, from 500-800 AD. It is pottery with brown, black and red slips, manganese dioxide deposits. I love

her pose.

Pre-Classic Mexico gives us this "female figure" from 350 BC to 250 AD, with designs painted on her in brown pigment.

Whether "Female Figure" is truly a goddess is of course something the people who made them knew, but we can only guess. The MezoAmerican figures in clay include many males as well as females, unlike the Pre-historic Mesopotamian figures which were primarily female. But my thought is that there must have been something special in the minds of the artists who created these forms, and it could well have been a concept of how these female figures reminded them of a higher ideal - a goddess.