Unleash Your Inner Pyromaniac

A cult grows around the complicated art of wood-fired ceramics.

Eva Funderburgh, Two Beasts with Horns and Teeth, wood-fired porcelain, 2008

Through the end of May, if you visit Tacoma’s Gallery Madera, you will get a chance to glimpse wood-fired ceramics by Northwest artists. These pieces have provoked a cultlike fascination among artists and collectors, not unlike the cult surrounding glass art. Like glass, this work is shaped by chance, heat and processes that seem almost outside the artist’s control.

What the slow-food movement is to foodies, wood firing is to ceramics artists and collectors. A firing is an event, a ritual that occurs perhaps three or four times a year at each of the wood-fire kilns scattered around the Northwest. Even though the process of baking clay forms in wood fire has been around for thousands of years, it’s still about experimentation and discovery.

For two years in a row, Gallery Madera has mounted a show featuring an array of works from an eclectic group ranging in age from twenties to sixties. Some Madera artists favor the functional, like Reid Ozaki, a ceramics instructor at Tacoma Community College. His creations include stylized vases for ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. Relative newcomer Andy Lewis-Lechner, also from Tacoma, makes richly textured envelope-like vessels, while Portland’s Jennifer Lee makes earthy tea bowls and sake sets.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who are drawn to the sculptural. One example is Eva Funderburgh of Seattle, who creates surreal, whimsical and often dark creatures. Most of the work in the show falls somewhere in between, merging utility with highly stylized designs. No matter what the intent or style of a piece, wood-fired ceramics is the antithesis of production pottery — uniform pieces such as tableware or lamps that are often mass produced, glazed and fired at lower temperatures, typically with gas heat.

Excitement vibrates through a gathering in the remote town of Elkton, Oregon. Everyone focuses on a single point: the door of a cooled-down wood-fire kiln. Inside, clay forms have endured days of flames hot enough to melt cast iron. Now the forms have finished cooling and resting and are about to come out into the light of day.

Eight artists turned pyromaniacs, their family members and friends have come together for the unveiling. A few gallery owners and collectors are also present, people who have become as religious about wood-fired kiln openings as some are about glass-art openings. What is all the hype about? Perhaps it is the delicate nature of the process itself or the symbiotic relationship between the artist and the elements. In wood-fired ceramics, the artist creates the form, but the flames, the ash and the minerals in the trees used in firing create the color, finish and texture. Pieces born of this marriage between the artist’s designs and the arbitrary effects of fire run the gamut from purely functional to strictly sculptural, and often the line between the two blurs.

Wood-fire ceramists shape and prepare the raw clay using a variety of techniques from a potter’s wheel. With a few exceptions, they rarely apply traditional glazes unless it’s to coat the interior of a watertight vessel. Instead, natural fly ash from the burning wood melts onto the clay surface during firing and acts as a glaze.

Award-winning ceramics artist Colleen Gallagher, who owns a wood-fired kiln on Hartstene Island with well-known ceramist John Benn, explains the effect she attains with a few broad strokes of slip (a cream-thick mixture of clay and water) on the surface of her work: “Slip-treated surfaces respond differently to the flames than untreated surfaces.” Some of her pieces demonstrate her point with defined and complex variations in color and finish.

When the time for firing comes, artists arrange their raw pieces inside the kiln, mindful of placement, proximity to other pieces as well as to the wood, and method of loading (either tumble stacked or arranged on shelves). This exacting process can take anywhere from hours to days. Then the firing begins — a communal effort in which typically six to eight artists rotate in shifts around the clock, stoking the fire with cord after cord of wood to keep it raging for days. The process is random and organic, the outcome entirely a function of constant direct contact of flame and ash with clay.

Sixty-seven-year-old Hiroshi Ogawa began his journey in 1959 when he threw his first pot, and it has since carried him to the fulfillment of a dream: Hikarigama, his own wood-fired kiln. Hikari means “light” or “illumination,” and gama means “kiln.” When asked whether he owns Hikarigama or it owns him, this unassuming man doesn’t have to deliberate. “We are partners,” he says of the massive, two-chambered anagama kiln that he designed and constructed (Anagama is an ancient style of kiln that hails from Asia.) Alongside Ogawa’s Elkton, Oregon, farmhouse — where the abovementioned gathering took place — the twenty-five-foot-long kiln climbs a hillside, pulling the wood flames up through a six-foot-wide tunnel past the clay forms inside.

Ogawa describes the wood-firing process as an exercise in letting go. The many ingredients inside the kiln — temperature, flame path, placement, space, duration, the variety of wood, the type of clay, and the shape of the piece and its surface treatments — combine in a complex recipe that determines the outcome of each piece. The earthy tones of the melted ash, the understated blushes, the showy flashes and the crystalline surface textures are all nature’s contributions.

John Harris, an Auburn ceramics artist, likes to work with asymmetrical forms for the different flame paths and more unpredictable patterns and finishes that result. Harris keeps the flames on his work for up to a hundred hours, but some kilns fire for a week or longer. Once the firing process has run its course, the kiln must cool down for several days before it is opened.

A newly fired piece, even if it’s a familiar form, is always a revelation. Roger Ward of Tacoma, a collector and an avid fan of the wood-firing process, attends kiln openings whenever he can. He explains that his fascination with the medium centers on the fact that so much is left to chance. “Each firing brings out different characteristics of the clay, and no one, not even the artist, can anticipate the glaze or the outcome. Whenever I attend a kiln opening, the artists are as excited as kids on Christmas morning.”