Wood & Wild
There’s no replacement for wildness, hard work, great focus, and the chaos of fire.
Each making cycle starts with a shovel in our hand and earth in our nails as we collect and prepare the wild clay. Working with locally sourced clay and a wood fired kiln is hard work. There are much easier ways to make pots, but we’d have it no other way. It’s the journey we love, and at the end something deeply unique and beautiful emerges.
Local Wild Clay
Making pots starts with the clay. Our Local Wild pots are made with our personal clay mix, which mostly consists of locally harvested wild clay. We love being outdoors and it’s an adventure to hunt wild clay. It’s good to know where our clay comes from and experience a bit of its past to better understand it’s future. There’s something special about holding wild clay in your hands. Food for past generations grew from it. The roots of great trees held it tightly. The rain waters carried it off the field and along the water ways of our community where it eventually found rest. It has stories to tell and wants to connect us with something bigger than ourselves.
Once dug, the clay is dried in the sun before being re-hydrated, mixed, screened, and dried to a moldable consistency. How much we process the clay is significant to the final product. It’s the first creative decision we make.
Working with wild clay presents many challenges. We must learn it’s strengths and weaknesses; it’s personality. In doing so we gain great depth and character in our pots and lives.
Wood Fired Kiln
Our Local Wild pots withstand the harsh conditions inside our wood fired kiln. The flames from the fireboxes flow up into the ware chamber, and dance around the pots leaving their mark on the clay. We slowly take the kiln through temperature hikes & holds, and heavy reduction atmosphere cycles on our way up to maximum temps between 2350°F and 2400°F. The high temps turn the clay pots ceramic and melt the glaze materials into a glassy surface. The open flame, high temps, reduction atmosphere and fly ash give us pots that cannot be achieved any other way. There’s no replacement for hard work, great focus and the chaos of fire.