Yareah Magazine

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Mark Smalley. "Words of Clay"
by the sculptor Mark Smalley

  • First ash glaze test
    Yesterday,  I tried out some wood ash over a shino glaze and a new ash glaze, which is actually a mixture of a “fake” ash glaze and real wood ash. I was fairly pleased with the results. The teabowl below is glazed with carbon trap shino glaze plus a little mixed wood ash (unwashed) applied to the rim. I also created [...]

  • Michal Puszczynski, The Art of Fire
    Not long ago, I discovered the fabulous sculptures of  Michal Puszczynski, a ceramic artist who lives in Poland and who also works in France, Switzerland and Korea. Puszczynski creates wood-fired work which he describes as “a bow to Nature”; nothing without it, nothing like it.  He states that it is difficult to explain his own work, and that is [...]

  • My first carbon-trap, shino mug!
    This weekend I tried out a new carbon-trap, shino glaze, adapted from a recipe by Ben Brierley (http://www.ben-brierley-woodfired-ceramics.co.uk/).  I opened the saggar this morning and was delighted to see the glaze on this coffee mug, which shows evidence of some carbon trapping. Some of the glaze has crawled where it’s been applied in two layers, but where the top layer has cracked [...]

  • Andy Goldsworthy, Sculptor, Photographer, Environmentalist
    “I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.” Andy Goldsworthy is an artist whose work I have long admired. He [...]

  • My latest firing..success!
    Making progress with ceramics can be a slow process of trial and error. To achieve success, one usually has to extensively test glazes and clay bodies and discover which combinations work well at a given temperature. One of the advantages of an electric kiln is that the firing conditions remain fairly consistent, so outcomes are more predictable when you adjust one or two variables. So far, my saggar experiments [...]