Potter thrilled with the first firing from home-built kiln
Annette Bull’s “New Wood-fired Collection” at the Rabbit Room is the result of the first firing in a newly-built wood kiln that’s been a collaboration with her husband, Natham Crossan.
Her ceramic vessels are simple in form and finely elegant, earthy in colour. She uses porcelain clay to form the translucent lightshades that hang from the ceiling in the Rabbit Room, the light revealing variations in thickness and speckles in the clay surface. Her brown stoneware vessels, bowls and vases show mottled surfaces with touches of silvery grey on the chino glaze, effects that were generated by ash during firing.
Wood kilns are generally huge brick structures that require vast stacks of dry wood and manpower to keep the fires fed over several days and nights to reach the high temperatures necessary to achieve the unpredictable ash glazed surface effects so sought after by potters and collectors.
Bull has experience of woodfiring through the occasional firings at the Waiohiki Arts Village but, as a professional potter, she has long dreamed of the possibility of a “woman-sized“version at their rural property in Clive, and of being able to control the process and so fully develop her own techniques through more frequent firings.
Crossan shares this dream although not a potter himself; he and Bull have together successfully built a smaller wood kiln (known as a “train” kiln) over a year in their spare time.
“A wood firing is a lot of work,” says Annette.
“Living close to the sea I collect driftwood washed up on the shingle banks. It has to be sorted into thicknesses and lengths because the fire requires twig-sized branches first to build heat and then larger as the fire is established.
“On firing day I was out there at 7am, lighting the fire, the pottery was already loaded into the kiln and I fed the wood into the firebox all day until Natham and son Max (17) come home at 3.30pm — by then it had reached 400C. They joined in the stoking, building heat until the kiln reached 1300C some time the following morning,” she says.
“But the biggest excitement came when the flame burst from the top of the chimney, indicating a ‘reduction’ atmosphere in the kiln, required to develop the colour in the clay and the glaze.”
The Rabbit Room in Hastings Street, Napier is an intimate space for displaying art. To find it, look for Vinci Pizza at the cathedral end, it is in the alley between Vinci and Music Machine. Annette Bull will be on site today.
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