Being a woodfire potter, well I was always a believer
that fire is your friend. You can use it as a tool.
And I still feel fire is a friend. But they're not all friendly, are they? So, yeah.
We got burnt down in the 2020 bushfires here at Cobargo.
We came to this studio area, but there was a lot of firewood stacked here,
I was ready to do a firing, it was all up by the buildings.
And then we went to our house, and stayed up there as the
fire front came through, and protected our house.
We came back to the studio after an hour or two, when we thought, "The house is right here".
And no, everything was on fire, and we didn't even drive in the gate.
We just had a look from the gateway and thought, "It's too dangerous to go down there,
and there's nothing you can do anyway". So we just let it all burn.
We had a studio full of pots ready to do a firing,
all the wood to do a firing. That's about five months’ worth of working, yeah.
And it destroyed all of it, nothing of that survived.
I haven't done a firing for two years now.
I did have still a bit of a trickle of an income,
because there was always work out there that didn't get destroyed.
But as that sold, I had nothing to replace it with.
I've got a gallery in Sydney, one in Mittagong, a few local ones down here.
This work in this kiln is to replace those shops and galleries I had.
So yeah, it's important to me to get a good lot of pots
so I've got some quality work to take out again.
There'd be about 600 kilos of clay made into pots,
or 700 kilos of clay. There's probably 5, 6, 700 pieces in there.
It is a bit like returning to the beginning, yeah.
And, it's fairly frustrating, there's no doubt about it,
especially when you're doing jobs you know you've done before.
This firing we're doing is going to take us about 100 hours.
We start with a fire on the outside of the kiln, letting it just suck in the air holes.
And then we put a fire in the chamber.
We like to have a crew of six people, and we split it into three 8-hour shifts.
It's a very natural process and it's all about the flame
travelling through the kiln, and depositing ash. In the firing and how you fire your kiln,
and the fuel you use, is what determines what the surfaces and the colours are like.
That makes everything individual, so every pot in there
is going to be different to the one beside it.
We're putting probably about a wheelbarrow of wood
every five or ten minutes into it.
And once all the wood's turned into charcoal, it's time to restoke.
This is day three now, it's probably about 1,200 degrees in there.
It needs to burn for a little bit more. You've got to get to 1,300. Even if they're
20 or 30 degrees short, it's going to be noticeably short.
It will be half of the wood is used just in the last 100 degrees.
And half of the time, so the last 40 hours,
it will take us probably 40 hours to get 100 degrees now.
We're about 95 or 100 hours in, and we've got 1,320 degrees in the front, and probably
1,280 to 1,300 degrees up in the main chamber. And these guys are having a big
stoke to finish it off. This is how you want to finish,