Summary
A painter, seeing one of Bill Gilbert's pots, could die of envy. In his hands -- or rather in the anagama kiln where he fires his ceramics at temperatures up to 2,400-degrees Fahrenheit -- glaze and clay fuse, shapes shift as pots approach the melting point, and ash merges with liquid glaze. Mere paint could never match the textures, rich tones, and glasslike sheen of Gilbert's pots.
Firing up and stoking the anagama kiln, built into a hillside outside of Cerrillos, N.M., is a community effort involving from 15 to 18 local potters. It takes two weekends to prepare the kiln: one stacking wood and another arranging the 600 pots the kiln can hold. The firebox at the front of the kiln is 4 to 5 feet long, the main chamber is about 16 feet long, and the chimney runs another 16 feet. Some wood-fired kilns have several chambers, a design that allows potters a lot of control. An anagama kiln has just one huge chamber, and the open space filled with pots and stoked from three sides is a chaos of fire, carbon, and ash, Gilbert explained. Some pots are stacked in the chimney where temperatures stay a bit lower.See the full content of this document
Extract
Anagama de Vida, Baby
The Cerrillos anagama kiln snakes uphill, resembling a dragon (facing downhill), with a sliding metal door where its head should be. On a recent evening Gilbert and four other potters fed wood into the front door and the three portholes on the kiln's sides, and the portholes glowed red through th...
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