It’s said, that failure is the best teacher and as someone who is constantly experimenting in the studio and consequently experiencing a healthy dose of failures as part of my process, I couldn’t agree more. I have learned to take failures in my stride, to pick out lessons from my mistakes without dwelling too much on what could have been and forge on ahead to the next series of experiments. However every now and then I am faced with an issue that absolutely confounds me, when all the potential solutions don’t seem to remedy the problem, when I find myself hitting a wall. For me that is the time to make the SOS call to my friend, Louis Katz. If you are lucky enough to know Louis, then you know exactly what I mean. However if you have never met Louis, let me tell you a bit about him. Professionally Louis is professor emeritus, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. More importantly he is a ceramics research scientist with a vast knowledge of ceramic materials and a passion for experimentation. He has an unquenchable curiosity which leads him down uncharted territories and an unconventional way of thinking that produces the most unique ideas. To top it off, he has a deep love for teaching and sharing his knowledge with anyone who expresses interest in learning. Simply put he is a genius with a heart of gold!
I met Louis years ago at the Texas Clay Festival when he walked into my booth and started looking closely at my yunomis. Having no idea of who he was and a little taken aback by his wild hair, I remember being a bit hesitant. However, as we started conversing, and he began rattling off ideas of materials I could experiment with to further my process, I became curious, wondering who this person was! Though I was only able to comprehend a tiny part of the conversation, it was enough to stir up interest and guarded admiration. He had opened my mind to new possibilities just by saying, ” have you given such an such material a try?” Or, “try incorporating this material into your work.”
Back in the studio, I started giving his ideas a try. I found myself working with unconventional material which although frought with failures, yielded some promising results, enough to keep me wanting to go further. I started looking forward to my yearly interactions with Louis at the Texas Clay Festival. He would come to my booth with enough time at hand, knowing fully well that I would inundate him with questions. For years I have maintained a google doc on my phone, called “Conversations with Louis”, where I take down notes, not wanting to miss a word he says, even though most of it doesn’t make sense to me until much later. The nuggets of information that he has fed me over the years have triggered ideas that have had a profound influence on my work. An anecdote comes to mind that illustrates the nature of our conversations. On one of our meetings, I was sharing my disappointment with Louis of not being able to incorporate feldspar chunks into my clay since I only fired to cone 6, and the chunks needed to be fired much hotter for them to melt. Without missing a beat, Louis rattled off a recipe and a process (which he had thought of on the spot) to create my own feldspar like chunks that would melt at cone 6. I followed his instructions exactly and was blown away when I got the desired results! With every such interaction my respect for his knowledge has deepened but what really endears him to me is his immense generosity and his unfettered excitement to share his knowledge with anyone who cares to learn from him. As our friendship blossomed Louis became my go to person anytime I was confronted with a ceramic problem that google couldn’t help me solve.
Which brings me to the most recent events that inspired this post in the first place. I had been working on a series of thick, shallow bowls with the intention of bordering them with a torn edge. Anyone who’s worked with a plastic, commercial clay body knows the inordinate amount of grog one needs to add to counter the plasticity, to facilitate a beautiful tear without stretching the clay. Commerical grog being expensive, I normally mix in large amounts of sand and vermiculite which is cheap and readily available. Up until now adding this mix to my clay hadn’t been an issue maybe because the pieces I had made so far were of regular thickness. However with this series I was aiming to make bowls that were atleast two inches thick so that I could create a nice, exaggerated torn edge.
Following my regular procedure, I mixed all the crunchy material into my clay and made bowls with nice ripped edges. After drying the pieces for over a month, I loaded the bowls into the kiln to bisque with a nice long preheat cycle. That’s when disaster struck.
As I opened the kiln I was confronted with this sight:
All the bowls that I had made had totally disintegrated in the kiln. After I got over the shock, I started theorizing about what might have caused the issue and the only logic that kept coming to mind was that I had probably added way more grog mix than the clay could handle and the bowls had simply disintegrated in bisque due to the lack of adhesion. With that idea as the guiding principle , I made the pieces again with lesser grog mix, which made it challenging to get a good tear. However despite the alteration, the same fate awaited my pieces upon bisque firing. I was confounded! However still sticking to the premise of lack of adhesion being the cause behind this problem I wondered what could be added in addition to the grog that would not only help make the clay short but would also melt enough at bisque to help provide extra adhesion and prevent the pieces from falling apart. With that specific question in mind, I reached out to Louis who immediately switched to a video call. He looked at the mess in my in kiln, asked me questions about the inclusions I had added to my clay, made me roll a coil to rule out my hypothesis of lack of adhesion being the cause of the disaster and homed in on vermiculite as the potential problem. Vermiculite, as I learned later, doesn’t just have regular moisture but it also has chemically bonded water. Though the preheat cycle was removing the regular moisture, the chemically bonded water which isn’t released until higher temperatures was causing the steam to build up in these pieces at a later stage in firing. That in conjunction with the extra thickness was causing the pieces to actually blow up during bisque. He suggested experimenting with a very slow bisque, going up at the rate of 50 F/ hour especially up until 1000 F. As I read up on vermiculite, the rationale made sense. With trepidation, I loaded one last set of bowls that were still remaining, set a preheat of three hours and then decided to go up steadily at 80F / hour up until 1828 F. The firing took about 23 hours throughout which I stole quick peeks from time to time to ascertain that the pieces were still okay. However it was only after the kiln cooled and I held the pieces in my hand, did I, metaphorically speaking, unclench my crossed fingers and rejoiced.
Louis had come to my rescue yet again! Thank you Louis for always being there for me and for helping me out of my various predicaments as I venture down rabbit holes in my very experimental and unorthodox clay journey.
PS Going further. I will be calcining my vermiculite so that the next time I decide to incorporate it into my clay, I won’t have to worry about the chemically bonded water creating havoc