On The Grog

BRT thoughts| 18/2/2020

Tug it, push it, smack it. This ain't porcelain baby this is that thick, rich, chunky BRT clay. This clay has got form. Thick rocky, shards of grog hold the contents of this clay vessel together. Grog is a collection of small, crushed peices of fired ceramics, together they take up the heavy lifting for the softer unfused clays. They provide the steel wiring to a setting concrete. Groggy clays are my favourite clays to work with. Even when throwing on the wheel I like to chuck these gritty rocks into my clay. Watch out though! Too much grog in the mix, the spinning clay will sandpaper your hands into bloody stumps. While this is a great exfoliation, doctors and hand models don't recommend the practice. If you get the balance of grog right though, you will be rewarded with a smooth, throwing clay that can still support it's weight with ease.


Grog, I love saying you out-loud, I love putting you in my clay. You allow me to get away with so much. Where a porcelain or a smooth terracotta may give up, seeing my form as too much ask, grog never gives up. It reduces cracking, it helps with thermal shock, it makes a surface sparkle with imperfections. Grog makes life easy and makes things beautiful. I can't make perfect work. I know people who can, porcelain throwers, terracotta coilers, manganese-clay burnishers, all these practitioners have a virtue for the perfect and the patience to achieve it, I have neither. Give me your foulest clay. Let my hands soak into the dirtiest layers of silica. Let my clay be tarnished with the roughest impurities. Give me your smoothest, flawless porcelain and ill fill it with my thick, grisly, granules of grog.


I love BRT. A buff raku clay with a hint of trachyte. Trachyte is a volcanic crystal formed on the surface of Earths crust. Trachyte is a great grog, not a high-fire clay but a high-fire glaze. Made chiefly of alkali feldspar's these crystal structures go from rock hard granules to smooth iron bleps at cone 10. In reduction BRT is a beauty, with no manganese, the darkness of BRT gives Feeney's chocolate™ a run for it's money. Trachyte is strewn all over the east coast of Australia. Formed in pools of silica rich lava the exposure to the cool air quenched these fiery lakes into fine crystals. I feel lucky to have access to such a gorgeous, contaminated material. With so many varieties and imperfections, it's impossible to give trachyte a simple chemical formula. Each rock, each pebble, each snippet of a prehistoric lava flow is a chaotic beauty that ought to be appreciated.

Trachyte; a wild collection of potassium feldspars. Trachyte; a glaze that sparkles like black suns. Trachyte; a grog not fired in a mortal's kiln but in the Earth's furnace. Trachyte you are my favourite grog.

Warrumbungles mountain range, Orana range NSW

Great location to source trachyte, formed by a volcano active between 13 to 17 million years ago

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

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachyte#/media/File:The_Breadknife.jpg

I love when my glaze is crunchy

Crazed | 5/2/2020

Krasa is an old Swedish word meaning crunchy. Atlantic trade and war would thrust this word into the vocabulary of the English during the middle ages. Co-opting this word through Germanic means they used the word “crazed” to define something that was “full of cracks and flaws”. It wouldn't be long until the word's attachment would shift from intimate objects to disturbed humans. Crazy has often been used to slander people whose psyche has cracked under tension. Most humans at some point will start to feel this breaking point. Sometimes we can out stronger, often we come out permanently scarred. Stress is natural part of life, but then again so is cyanide. Struggle and stress have both created and destroyed beautiful things and beautiful people. As with most things balance is this key, tension can create, but tension can also destroy. Tension is good, destruction is not.

Matching a glaze to a clay is like matching a suit to a body. It's important to get a snug fit. Too loose, the pot will find it's coat of glaze falling off to reveal it's bare naked body. Too tight, the pot may tear itself like a pair of jocks in deep squat. Between these two extremes there is a lot of room for style. A perfect glaze fit, meaning the clay and glaze shrink at the same rate, will provide a comfortably fitting piece of clothing for the pot. Smooth and orderly this outfit is relaxing, inviting and functional. If however someone chooses to ditch the utilitarian style of clothing and go for something that shows off their form, they might choose clothes that hug tight. If the glaze fit is slightly miss matched you can get a glaze that will hold onto the body and yet splinters with small cracks of tension. These cracks and valleys can be comfortable homes to whatever coffee or tea stains choose to settle in these lesions. For my sculptural work I love to use sumi ink, the fine particles of burnt pinewood provides a great medium that lodge themselves into these cracks. Crazing, like a pair of fishnet stockings, can show off the pot's form. The spiderweb like pattern wraps itself around the pot giving an otherwise flat form depth and definition. The thinner the glaze the tighter the pattern becomes. I love a crazed pot. A crazed pot demands your attention, it's form so tangible it allures you to really understand the piece. Crazed pottery shows glaze for what it is, not a flat 2d print but thick, rich layers that smother the piece below.