burnt embers

Happy New Year everyone!

This is one of my favourite cups from which to drink tea. I use it almost daily. Why it is a favourite should, I hope, be obvious to anyone. It has such fantastic form, decoration and colours. But also, the indentations in the cup make it easier to hold, it feels more comfortable than most cups and less like it might slip from the hand. It just feels like it was made to be in my hand, which counts for a lot.

Recently I showed high magnification macros of crystals on two of Gordon Hutchens’ pots and today I show just this one cup that I was given for a wedding anniversary present last year. Gordon is a potter based on Denman Island which is one of the Gulf Islands and located a few hours north of Victoria (see this link for his website).

This cup comes from, I am pretty sure, his Anagama wood fired kiln. This is a traditional style of Japanese kiln which climbs a hillside distributing the heat through the kiln as it rises up the slope. I would imagine it allows for a much greater volume of kiln to be fired from a fixed amount of wood – kind of like firing in a chimney. It takes about 2 days to fire. During my childhood I helped fire a wood kiln for ~8 hour firings, literally splitting whole trees into kindling to get the desired temperatures, and diving into a nearby lake to cool off many times during the day. I can’t imagine a 2 day firing and when there might be time to relax and sleep. But Gordon’s is a much more efficient kiln than the one at my family summer cottage and perhaps it only needs stoking every hour or two rather than every few minutes. The placement of a pot in the kiln relative to currents of hot air and ash creates the variations in the colour and lustre of the unglazed portions of the pot surface. It is because of these wonderfully organic variations that were I forced to choose between the many wonderful types of pottery that Gordon produces, it would have to be these wood fired pieces.

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