Ode to feldspar

Glaze thoughts 8/1/2020

Glaze, the impervious layer that hugs its ceramic core. Glaze, the glistening coating that makes pottery glow with an aura of it's own. Glaze, the soft skin whose surface we kiss with each sip of a vessel.

Oh, but what is glaze? An archaic rock? A splintering glass? A cascading liquid?

Glaze, the shape-shifter of the ceramic world should never be defined as merely one thing, for it's magic lies in it's transitions.

Feldspar, the Earth's ready made glaze. It's a glaze cake mix, that you can add your own ingredients and or subtleties to. Responding consistently to the cooking process feldspar's form the foundation of many recipes. This mineral starts it's journey deep within the Earth's mantle. A magma soup of silica, aluminum and various metal oxides, together they dance around a revolving sun of iron and nickel. This swirling pool of liquid rock will occasionally peep it's head out into the caverns below our feet. Constantly creeping, it will carve it's way through through impassible rock, occasionally climaxing to spill onto the Earth's surface. Once this fierce demon from the underworld has grown tired, it will cool, leaving veins of petrified feldspar in its wake. From a liquid to a solid this glaze rests in it's new settled state. Keen to sleep, the being rests, not waking for eons.

Our eyes rest upon a rocky outcrop. Fire and brimstone made dormant, the view is calm yet menacing. The splintered slab stands defiantly, tantalizing us with what it hides beneath it's shawl. Our eye's rest upon a white seam stretching the length of the volcanic tomb.
There it is.

We thrash at the Earth till we shave off fragments of this glorious feldspar. From fragments, we make powders and from powders we make glaze.

Glaze, the cream for which our pots will be smothered in. A white,viscous liquid it firms as it touches the dry barren clay. Together, the glaze and the clay will forever consummate their connection within the kiln firing.

Whoossssssh.

The burners light. A flame's tongue whips around the kiln flooding the pot with an amber glow. Slowly as the inferno blazes, the feldspar feels itself transitioning into a new state. No longer a dry powder it forms into a molten mass. Free to finally move, the glaze draws itself closer to the Earth from whence it came. Dripping slowly the glaze is self-governing and loose, the material's agency is restored.

STOP. Gas burners, halted. Flue's closed. Cool down begins.

The pot holds it's amber glow, the feldspar fusing into long glass chains, finally we have a glaze.

I'm always in awe at what can survive the violence of a kiln firing. 1280 degrees of flame and damnation is a lot to overcome. Strontium, calcium, tin, these are all elements that would have combusted long before we could reach our target temperature. To survive a kiln is to survive the nine rings of hell. Birthed in the scorched cauldron of our inner planet feldspar's continue to overcome the greatest of stresses. Much like the phoenix through flame and fire they rebirth into a new, more astonishing form. They are godly. This material endures pain, torment, and stress and yet leaves with kiln with such beauty, such grace, such subtly that you start that think it feels at home in the cauldron.

"Your energy charges my voice, it radiates my heart;

Now I am alive with the ore of words pouring

From my lips like molten lava glittering with joy.”

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, Words of paradise

Feldspar crystal (18×21×8.5 cm) from Jequitinhonha valley, Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil

IMAGE 1

Photocredit @/janellelow_   http://www.janellelow.com/

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Image source (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Feldspar-Group-291254.jpg)