Artist Reflux: 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.