Conversations: The Kiln Master's Vigil

Editor's note: kiln masters are the generals of the ceramic world. Our guest supervises firings that run three days and nights.

The Vigil

'Seventy-two hours. That is what a serious reduction firing costs you — in fuel, in attention, in sleep. I have a cot in the kiln shed. I nap in twenty-minute fragments, because the critical moments never announce themselves. At 3 a.m., when the flame is doing something new, you must be awake to read it.'

Reading the Spy-Hole

'Through the spy-hole, the interior of the kiln glows like a vision of the sun. The color of that glow tells me everything: yellow-orange means too much oxygen; the deep red of full reduction means the glaze is being robbed of oxygen correctly. One hour of misreading — one hour of the wrong atmosphere — and the entire load turns to dull brown. I have ruined many loads learning that hour.'

The Moment of Opening

'You wait two days for the kiln to cool. Then you open the door — and the first thing you see is the smell, then the heat, then the pieces. And you scan them like a farmer scanning a harvest: which ones survived? Which are luminous? Which failed? Out of a hundred, I celebrate maybe thirty. The rest return to the earth. That is the arithmetic of this craft — and it is why authentic pieces cost what they cost. You are paying for the seventy that failed.' See the full 13-step process →