The Island Pit Firing
This pit firing was a great example of what happens when you have two options and choose neither clearly. But also a good example of how you can get inspired from almost anything if you put your head on a certain way.
My wife's family cottage is on an island on Lake Simcoe. It's a lovely place, and home to some fabulous honey from the U of Guelph apiaries. There for the weekend, I thought it'd be great to dig a hole in the ground and experiment with making some kind of furnace à la ancient Egypt.
A fiery hole in the ground with a vent or two for air flow, or maybe the vents could be used for bellows or a fan, to get the temperature hot enough to fire up some clay figures. Something like this, but for clay, not metal:
Or maybe I could make a fire in a pit with vents, and then create a reduction atmosphere for the clay figures, like in the final stage of a raku firing.
So in hindsight, all I really had clear was that I would dig a pit, make a fire in it, and then put some clay figures in that fire.
In the Crafts as taught by Silo, one aim is to learn to order your way of working (and thinking). That is, you come up with a plan before starting the work for the day, and then you proceed through that plan. The idea is to not improvise all over the place. For one, it's harder to learn if you make things up as you go along. All of this is related to developing a particular Tone as you work (more on Tone and the key attributes of the Crafts here.)
So then, without a clear plan, I proceeded to dig. And my afternoon of GRAND IMPROVISATION began!
One thing that struck me right away was how the first part of the plan—the simple part of digging a hole—turned out, in fact, to be the main challenge of the afternoon. Not just a matter of digging a hole, no, because Thorah Island is essentially just layers of rock with a wee bit of soil in between. In case you're curious, the rocks are, "Paleozoic limestone of the Ordovician period." ¹
Here are some pictures of these, "carbonate and siliciclastic sedimentary rocks of Middle Ordovician (Blackriveran to Trentonian) age."
I'd pry out one rock and suddenly there'd be three others. It took me a few hours to dig down a few feet.
When I finally had a little hole, I made a vent on one side, with a little rock to keep the soil above from collapsing.
And another on the other side, thinking that air could be drawn in one and pulled out the other. (In the photo above, the little shovels indicate where the vents are, with the main firing hole in the middle.)
I built a little test fire inside and it seemed both well sheltered from the wind, and well-fed by air.
Then I put in my little figures—Venuses, pine cones, yoni-lingam—covered them up with some moss and grass, and built up the fuel all around.
When I lit it up, the fire grew quickly—the venting worked very well.
But as the flames grew, I realized that in order to get the fire hot enough to fire the clay, I would need to sit there for a long time feeding it more and more wood. So I decided right then and there [IMPROVISATION ALERT!] that I'd smother the fire and create that reduction atmosphere, and let the pieces cook for a long time, as if I was making charcoal.
I had a grate that I'd brought along and, throwing it over the hole, I covered it with the grass and soil and rocks I'd dug up.
From the visible wisps of smoke, it was clear that the fire kept burning below. In fact, it burned for at least 9 hours, at which point I went to bed.
But before then I began to suspect that nothing would come of this—that the fire would not be hot enough to fire the pieces. And that what I had done was a little of one option and a little of the second option, neither making a super-hot bellows-fed fire, nor a good-old fashioned pit firing, improvising all the live-long day.
I must have dreamed about reducing atmospheres, because the next morning I woke up with the phrase "incomplete combustion" in my head. What happens when your fire doesn't have enough air to burn properly is that it pulls oxygen from within the clay itself. So your reduction-fired pieces can be more or less black all the way through depending on how much oxygen was pulled from within them. It's a process of incomplete combustion (with soot and smoke and carbon monoxide, etc.). The fire keeps burning, just not completely.
And you? What do you do when you don't have enough "air"? When you find yourself living in a kind of "reduced atmosphere," where do you get the extra fuel to keep going? Where do you find it?
When I dug open the pit, I found...
A few smoke-smudged pieces:
And a beautiful spider that wandered inside as I dug down!
A couple of nice pieces of charcoal.
But obviously nothing got fired. This piece started crumbling in my hand, clear proof that it was only blackened clay.
So what can I say? It was fun to dig the pit and make the smoking mound, but since my plan wasn't clear to begin with, the main thing I learned was the importance of a clear plan.
And I learned that when faced with two desirable options, you must aim clearly at one, and not at a hazy point in-between both. Otherwise you end up with nothing but blackened baked mud.
And of course, I learned how hard it is to dig even a shallow hole on a rocky island.
But I think most interesting of all was the surprising little meditation on "incomplete combustion"...
¹ from: Armstrong, D.K. 2000. Paleozoic geology of the northern Lake Simcoe area, south-central Ontario; Ontario Geological Survey, Open File Report 6011, 43p.
My wife's family cottage is on an island on Lake Simcoe. It's a lovely place, and home to some fabulous honey from the U of Guelph apiaries. There for the weekend, I thought it'd be great to dig a hole in the ground and experiment with making some kind of furnace à la ancient Egypt.
A fiery hole in the ground with a vent or two for air flow, or maybe the vents could be used for bellows or a fan, to get the temperature hot enough to fire up some clay figures. Something like this, but for clay, not metal:
Or maybe I could make a fire in a pit with vents, and then create a reduction atmosphere for the clay figures, like in the final stage of a raku firing.
So in hindsight, all I really had clear was that I would dig a pit, make a fire in it, and then put some clay figures in that fire.
In the Crafts as taught by Silo, one aim is to learn to order your way of working (and thinking). That is, you come up with a plan before starting the work for the day, and then you proceed through that plan. The idea is to not improvise all over the place. For one, it's harder to learn if you make things up as you go along. All of this is related to developing a particular Tone as you work (more on Tone and the key attributes of the Crafts here.)
So then, without a clear plan, I proceeded to dig. And my afternoon of GRAND IMPROVISATION began!
One thing that struck me right away was how the first part of the plan—the simple part of digging a hole—turned out, in fact, to be the main challenge of the afternoon. Not just a matter of digging a hole, no, because Thorah Island is essentially just layers of rock with a wee bit of soil in between. In case you're curious, the rocks are, "Paleozoic limestone of the Ordovician period." ¹
Here are some pictures of these, "carbonate and siliciclastic sedimentary rocks of Middle Ordovician (Blackriveran to Trentonian) age."
I'd pry out one rock and suddenly there'd be three others. It took me a few hours to dig down a few feet.
When I finally had a little hole, I made a vent on one side, with a little rock to keep the soil above from collapsing.
And another on the other side, thinking that air could be drawn in one and pulled out the other. (In the photo above, the little shovels indicate where the vents are, with the main firing hole in the middle.)
Then I put in my little figures—Venuses, pine cones, yoni-lingam—covered them up with some moss and grass, and built up the fuel all around.
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But as the flames grew, I realized that in order to get the fire hot enough to fire the clay, I would need to sit there for a long time feeding it more and more wood. So I decided right then and there [IMPROVISATION ALERT!] that I'd smother the fire and create that reduction atmosphere, and let the pieces cook for a long time, as if I was making charcoal.
I had a grate that I'd brought along and, throwing it over the hole, I covered it with the grass and soil and rocks I'd dug up.
From the visible wisps of smoke, it was clear that the fire kept burning below. In fact, it burned for at least 9 hours, at which point I went to bed.
But before then I began to suspect that nothing would come of this—that the fire would not be hot enough to fire the pieces. And that what I had done was a little of one option and a little of the second option, neither making a super-hot bellows-fed fire, nor a good-old fashioned pit firing, improvising all the live-long day.
I must have dreamed about reducing atmospheres, because the next morning I woke up with the phrase "incomplete combustion" in my head. What happens when your fire doesn't have enough air to burn properly is that it pulls oxygen from within the clay itself. So your reduction-fired pieces can be more or less black all the way through depending on how much oxygen was pulled from within them. It's a process of incomplete combustion (with soot and smoke and carbon monoxide, etc.). The fire keeps burning, just not completely.
And you? What do you do when you don't have enough "air"? When you find yourself living in a kind of "reduced atmosphere," where do you get the extra fuel to keep going? Where do you find it?
When I dug open the pit, I found...
A few smoke-smudged pieces:
And a beautiful spider that wandered inside as I dug down!
But obviously nothing got fired. This piece started crumbling in my hand, clear proof that it was only blackened clay.
So what can I say? It was fun to dig the pit and make the smoking mound, but since my plan wasn't clear to begin with, the main thing I learned was the importance of a clear plan.
And I learned that when faced with two desirable options, you must aim clearly at one, and not at a hazy point in-between both. Otherwise you end up with nothing but blackened baked mud.
And of course, I learned how hard it is to dig even a shallow hole on a rocky island.
But I think most interesting of all was the surprising little meditation on "incomplete combustion"...
¹ from: Armstrong, D.K. 2000. Paleozoic geology of the northern Lake Simcoe area, south-central Ontario; Ontario Geological Survey, Open File Report 6011, 43p.
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