![]() ![]() The process of wood-firing, from prep to cleanup, can take upwards of a month depending on the kiln type and size. “It teaches people how to communicate, how to solve problems together, conflict resolution.” “Deep friendships have been formed around the kiln and, in fact, a couple marriages,” says Schwartz, who has led community firings for three decades. Naturally, many kilns have evolved into community hubs, drawing regulars who reunite by the mesmerizing blaze. Many kiln owners, like Schwartz and Thompson who now run Cider Creek Collective, invite artists to share kiln space in exchange for their labor some also rent out space to cover material costs. A rotating crew of stokers works in shifts that may last as long as 8, even 12, hours. Kilns must be fired nonstop for days, sometimes for more than one week, requiring constant vigilance as flames dance around the wares. Many are privately owned and were built to fire one artist’s ceramics. Some are owned by schools and open mostly to students others, like East Creek Anagama in Oregon, are community-based and host public workshops. There are no official statistics on the number of wood kilns in the United States, but Illinois-based potter Simon Levin has been crowdsourcing a searchable map of them that illustrates their vast geographic spread (see /map). ![]() ![]() “The proliferation of wood kilns is so different from when I started in 1985-there were hardly any,” says Conrad Calimpong, who has kilns in Ferndale, California. Originating in Southeast Asia and East Asia, the ancient tradition has survived despite the invention of gas and electric kilns. ![]() People have gathered around flames for millennia to fire ceramics with wood, watching as heat and ash mingle to leave singular marks on wares-glazes that are wholly natural. All of that goes away, and you need to watch this fire.” Tradition Revived It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you do. When we’re wood-firing, we have our purpose. “Before firing with Nick, I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. “Those two summers changed my whole life,” she says. She spent another idyllic summer by the fire, sharing meals with other artists, picking fruit, and cooling off by the river. “I was only 19, and I’m learning tips from people twice my age.” The group built another kiln, and the next year, Schwartz and Thompson invited Oakley back. “Off the bat, they were doing a wood-firing-all these people I didn’t know, from many different backgrounds, from North Carolina, Japan, India,” Oakley recalls. Schwartz and his wife, artist Jessica Thompson, were planning on doing it all over again that summer at the educational residency program they were hosting. She had just built and fired a wood kiln at Eckerd for the first time under the guidance of ceramists Nick Schwartz and Brian Ransom, and was instantly hooked by the multi- day process. For Oakley, then a sophomore at Eckerd College in Florida, traveling across the country to rural Mendocino County to lay bricks with strangers was a no-brainer. Jasmine Oakley received the invitation in 2017: Come to California and help build a wood-fired kiln. One of Conrad Calimpong’s Ferndale, California, kilns fully stacked with ceramics from multiple artists participating in the firing. ![]()
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