Category Archives: Dear Louise

Baan Maaw Mahasarakham

Baan Maaw village, Meuang Mahasarakham District, Mahasarakham province, Thailand kingdom Sometimes this village is refered to as Baan Pan Maaw บ้านปั่นหม้อ, rather than Pot Village this is Village [where] Pots [are] Formed. Pan ปั่น means spun. Its odd as the pots are mostly handbuilt. I wonder, but do not know if the longer name is newer, or not really used. 


Maaw (หม้อ), means “pot” as in pottery. Baan (บ้าน) means house. A village is a muu baan (หมู่บ้าน). The first part of this, “muu” (หมู่) usually refers to a group of houses or a village. Mail addresses often are associated with a muu, such as muu 4 Dankwian. That is a group of houses in an amphoe or district or in a muubaan. These muu are associated with how a mailman does his job. Its easy to be confused. 
Thailand
Provinces – Changwat(
Ampoe 
Tambon
Muubaan
Chumchom
Its more complicated than that. Large cities within provinces are generally referred to as Amphoe Mueang
maybe this needs clarification or deletion. 
But Baan Maaw is a village  with a clear  grouping away from other villages. The pots that they made were almost exclusively 8 liter or so, porous water cooling jars. They all have a stipled band that appears decorative just above the belly, the widest part, a broad rim and a lid. They are bonfire fired to about 760˚C or 1400˚F. This temperature is a guess based on the look of the fire. It could be as much 200 degrees fahrenheit lower. The pots are unglazed, although more recently (2014) some were being coated in tree resin when hot for a black and shiny finish, and some have been being treated with the Dankwian Antique Finish technique (discussed in the section on Dankwian Village). 
The clay, last time I. saw it being delivered to the village came by 2 wheel cart and was in 25cm cubes, (about 10 inches). It was cut from the ground wet with a flat shovel. I did not watch it being prepared. It is a sticky clay, and from the ground a light grey color. It bears no resemblance to Dankwian clay other than being fairly sticky. 
The clay is mixed with grog, or if you prefer chamotte, made with a novel technique. The grog, the only time I saw the beginning of the production, was made with mud from the bottom of the local reservoir Loeng Pan Maaw เลิงปั้นหม้อ . Loeng เลิง means marsh or swamp. The Loeng near Baan Maaw I believe was excavated to get fill and create a bigger reservoir. It appears to be much larger now (2014) than I remember it being in 1989. The mud is mixed with copious amounts of rice hulls to make ~ 15 centimeter balls, roughly six inches. The balls have a 2.5 cm diameter hole that goes in towards the center.  This creates an object that burns like very low grade charcoal briquettes.
Usually these are piled canonball style over some firewood in a 6 by six grid and about 5 layers high.. They are burned to a temperature similar to the temperature at which the pots are fired but probably a little lower. There is so little clay in these that they can easily be crushed with a persons weight and a shoe. It takes at least a few hours to burn and is not carefully attended as it does. 
Rice hulls are near perfect for this use. They are agricultural waste. They were traditionally burned to eliminate pests. While they can be added to soil, they are slow to decompose and light so they do not stay in place in flooded rice fields. Partially burned rice hull is a more suitable soil ammendment in rice fields. Consequently this use if effectively carbon neutral. They would likely be burned anyways. 
Rice hull ash is almost entirely silica. The two analyses I have show it as 96% silica, 1% alumina and less than 2% alkali metal and alkaline earths. The alkali metals and alkaline earths are soluble and some will end up in solution in the clay and alter the working properties. But this low amount is not enough to cause big problems. I believe that it at least contributes to the thixotropic feel of Baan Maaw clay. Thixatropy is the property of a material where with stirring or manipulation it becomes more fluid or flexible. 
Silica can be added to a clay in large percents, and quartz sand, another way to get silica, is sometimes added to clays to replace or instead of grog. But where the silica in quartz is crystyalline, the silica in rice hulls is amporphous. Quartz rapidly increases in size just above red heat, something potters call Quartz Inversion, and the size change can cause cracking in pottery. Amorphous silica does not exhibit this phase change, and therefore is safer as an addition to clay. It does not cause cracks. 
The silt that holds the rice hull balls together fires into a very porous structure with lots of sharp texture. That texture holds onto clay well. The quality of grog is related to how open the texture is and how sharp. Better grog makes stronger clay. Rounded smooth particals weaken a clay body both in the raw and fired states. I believe that this grog significantly adds to the amazing strength of the raw clay pots.It also, do to its open porous nature, makes fast firing easier to accomplish without explosions. 
The pots are started with a rolled cylinder process achieved with a stick about the diameter of a broom stick. The cylinders, maybe about 18 inches tall are place on damp fabric on one end and formed slightly by a hand placed on the inside in opposition to one on the outside. The pot is turned on the damp fabric. 
After this initial forming and a small amount of drying, it is placed on a stump and paddled into a larger form. The rim is thrown, not by spinning the pot but by walking around the pot quickly. The body of the pot still has a hole in the bottom from the cylinder rolling process. After setting to dry a little more the bottom is paddled closed. The form is then placed inside an old pot shoulder section, it having an appropriate curve and allowed to dry a little more. The shape is finished by paddling one or two more times. 
During the first part of drying, I think of it as the wet stage, as the water dries the particles of clay move closer together and the form shrinks. As this stage ends the clay gets much less maleable. In English people call this “leather hard”. This appears to be because at this stage it can be tooled like leather.But at this stage small voids form. They dissapear as the clay vitrifies, but the water that used to fill up these voids dries out. Its my theory that paddling removes some of these voids and also aligns flat clay platelets parallel to the surface of the pot. I have no great evidence of this.But the quality of the grog, and the paddling in Baan Maaw  Mahasarakham and other such potteries results in greenware (unfired ware) that is remarkably strong. The fired was is quite strong too, especially considering the firing temperature. 

Firing takes place in the afternoon when the sun is strong and the temperature hot. I believe that this is to reduce explosions caused by hygroscopically held water. I have never seen an exploded pot in Baan Maaw. I have only witness firings during the hot season.

The pots are fired “Bonfire” style. There is a lot of variation in bonfire firings but the firings here resemble some in other countries. There is a bed of thin sticks roughly 1 -2 inches in diameter placed up from the ground on roughly 4 inch tall fired ceramic props. This allows air under the bed early in the firing. Two layers of pots are placed on the stick bed. The first is placed rim down with six pots on each side of the square stack. So the grid of the first layer is 6X6 or 36 pots. The second layer has pots placed with rims up at about 60 degrees from directly vertical in a 5X5 grid for 25 pots. Lids are placed between the pots.The total stack holds about 61 pots. 

The stack is covered by rice straw and lit on fire. It all is engulfed in flame in the first few minutes. After a few minutes a second layer of straw is added. The access to air around the outside is managed and the outside pots are checked by color for how well fired they are. Additional straw is added until no longer necessary. The entire firing takes about 1 hour.

There are products other than the water jars that are produced in the village. One is rice cooking pots. These are small earthenware vessels meant for a few uses on top of a charcoal stove. Charcoal stoves are also produced in the village. There is a small amount of sculpture produced in the village. 

The charcoal stove design is an outgrowth of a USAID development project from before 1988. At the time a vast amount of wood was being turned into charcoal for day to day cooking in the villages. Besides being an agent of deforestation, pollution and environmental damage it was an expensive way to cook. The stoves were very inefficient. 

A newer project to produce stoves resulted in the Tao Mahasethee เตามหาเศรษฐี stove or “Billionaire Stove”. Because of the name when they show up in the press they are immediately ridiculed. Online posts about charcoal stoves in Thailand often ignore the earlier work.  ( see Stove Production in Korat)

 



What they make
Process,
progressive paddling and strength
Firing Rice Straw
Small wood
Stands

materials
Grog Balls

Thixotropy?

Market shift

Repairology

  • Repairology

    My brother Ralph bought a car used from a dealer. It had been repaired after a collision, but the repair was not evident. He uses the car for commuting. It had a new bumper fascia put on it as part of the repair but the fascia was painted without first applying a bonding agent to the plastic.. The fascia is the soft part of the bumper. The paint is peeling off of it. For someone wanting a neat car, this car has become grungy.

    Last year a construction “barrel” ( I one of those orange and white stripped affairs designed to damage cars in construction zones), blew in front of the car on the highway. Ralph did not report it or file an insurance claim. It would have been a hassle and life is busy. The barrel ripped the fascia. He now thinks that maybe he should have filed a claim. So it goes.

    A few days ago he drilled some holes on either side of the tear in the bumper fascia and connected the two sides together with plastic cable ties. The cable ties are white. The fascia without the paint is black. According to Ralph, ” the cable ties are what I had”. This got me thinking of repairs, how they are made, and why they are made, and how they are perceived. Right now the categorization slicing instrument in my brain is slicing “repair” into five different kinds.

    Coverup. (also known by the name “Buyer Beware Repair” or repair by gonif גנב)
    This is the kind of repair that is not supposed to be seen. Cars are often fixed after collisions so that you cannot see the repair. The same brother had the case of repair that he did not see and he bought a different car with damage. In Thailand 30 years ago we saw cracked water jars being skillfully repaired in the city of Ratchaburi with cement and then covered with skillful trompe l’oeil painting. These repairs cover a perhaps functionally deficient product so that it looks undamaged. If you are tuned in to the idea of ” buyer beware” then this sort of covering up of defects is acceptable. If you believe that the seller should point out faults in a product then they are not acceptable repairs, unless we are first told of them.
    Ratchaburi Jar being painted (1989)

    Ratchaburi Jar being painted (1989)

    Dis-appearance: In Phon Bok Thailand Stoneware mortars that have chips or surface details that are not perfect have them covered up with super glue covered with ashes. These repairs cover only cosmetic “flaws” that would lower the price because of appearances. Mortars that have functional defects are used for landfill, to make decorative walls, they are not sold. The mortars have to take a lot of abuse and are not expensive. If damaged they are not worth the hassle. Even the makers do not try to cover up functional defects. This would lower the value of their products.
    Cosmetic repair in Phon Bok

    Cosmetic repair in Phon Bok



    Just Repair: This is just a repair. No, or little consideration is made concerning the repair. It is just repaired. Nothing is covered up or concealed. This is the kind of repair that is held in high regard by Soetsu Yanagi when discussing Korean wooden bowls. It has a stance of honesty, of thusness, it is what it is. The bowls are turned from green wood. When they crack, they are repaired. This is what my brother did. He repaired his bumper with available cable ties. No cover up, no intent to do anything but make it functional.

    Bumper fascia repaired with cable ties

    Bumper fascia repaired with cable ties (photo credit Ralph Katz)

    Intentious Repair:
    This is a Just Repair specifically made with the intent of looking like a just repair. Pretentiously, rather than just making the repair, the intent is to make it look like you did not care about appearances. You not only might not care, you want others to know that you don’t. Louis does these. The picture of a bumper posted to the web by a sophisticated artist, even if the art is music, makes me wonder if Ralph’s qualifies as intentious. I have not asked. Either way it has sparked my interest. I have appreciated it. The bumper, at least in my mind is interesting. Appreciated it enriches life. Appreciation appreciates the value of an object or event. 
    I have shirts that I bought in 1989 in Thailand. In Thai the name of the shirts seems to be “humble shirts”. I wore mine every wash until they got fairly worn. Others would say “worn out”, but I prefer “broken in”. After that I wore them on non-school days. My personal feeling is that these shirts still have use with a little repair, and that long use is as functional, maybe more functional than recycling. So I have repaired these shirts. They are repaired rather funkily, wow spell check has “funkily”! The repairs are so obvious and perhaps overdone that they might go beyond intentious into the next category, The Conspicuous Elevation of Repair Repair.

    Conspicuous Elevated Repair, Kintsugi.

    Kintsugi is a Japanese repair technique often used on ceramics using urishi lacquer, a natural resin. It is water proof and holds up to mild heat. The repair resin, made from the sap of the urishi tree, is sometimes filled with iron oxide, but the upper layers are often instead filled or surfaced with gold powder. This makes the repair, a record of the objects history and its breaking, obvious. It makes the damage obvious, making it impossible to ignore. It holds, displays, asserts that use becomes tangible part of an object. In highlighting use and wear it elevated repair seems to demand that bowls are drunk from and not just displayed that you know it and that you remember.

    Rather than coverup, rather than mourning the inevitable, kitsugi is an affirmative joyful appreciation of the mutual arising of creation and destruction, afe, wear and tear, and eventual breaking of ceramics. The atmospheric firing of ceramics leaves a trace of its time in the kiln, the repair is just another page in the history of the work. Art is often made in a way the reveals the process of making. With tea ware in Japan there is recognition that who has drunk tea from a bowl, how it is stored, and in what manner it is handled becomes a part of the work. So does the wear and repair. Raku, a firing technique, and shino, a type of glaze both leave a surface with a fine network of cracks. This allows tea to stain the cracks and sometimes the clay body, overtime changing the appearance and making it appear worn before there really is any wear. 
    While most of the Japanese aesthetics surrounding tea ware stresses a quiet understated natural feel, Kintsugi seems almost diametrically opposed to this. . The contrast creates a sense of importance of the issues surrounding the repair .The gold, bright, valuable, associated with the aristocracy, seems wildly antithetical to the humble nature works that are repaired. On its visual soapbox, kitsugi loudly speaks, “I am a repair” . It is an unassailable statement affirming use and wear as an aspect of an object and aesthetics. If you don’t understand this, the gold slaps you in the face with the message.


    (Look up boro repair and shashiko Japanese clothing repair)

    But all of these repair techniques, and their associated intent are in some ways the same. Each tells a story, each leaves an impression of intent, or lack of it. Each expresses an attitude on the topic of mutual arising. Each tells of human nature. The difference is in the way we perceive and the way we appreciate them, and in our understanding of the intent of the person who repaired it. The difference, for the most part resides in the viewer. It is the viewer that appreciates, the creates the great value of the repair.

    Non Repair repair
    This is repair after intentionally breaking an object, or making an object specifically to look as if it is repaired. Goro Suzuki, whose work is purposefully broken is the master of the Non Repair repair. He intentionally breaks pieces to repair them, and really builds his work with kintsugi type repair techniques. For him it does not  need to be broken to repair it. Its like he is saying, “If its not broken fix it anyways.” I am not sure that there is anything as conspicuous as this kind of “repair”. The fact that it is not broken screams for its own category . The  function of the Non Repair repair is often to teach appreciation of repair.

    The place where repair has become more a part of the aesthetic culture than elsewhere is Japan. But modern Japan is quite a throw away society. Houses get too old, cars get too old, clothes have to look new and respectable, hair is always highly tamed.  But in this atmosphere kintsugi and the boro technique and  shashiko clothing repair seem a response to this, a cultural self criticism. Not being Japanese it is hard to know. 

    The appreciation of the worn, the repaired, the aged, the imperfect, while it seems far from modern Japanese day to day life, is part of the cultural aesthetic. But it also appears elsewhere. New blue jeans in the US can almost be embarassing in youth culture. This is so true that new jeans are often bleached, stone washed and intentionally distressed in other ways before being sold. Some of the coolest “hippy” clothing were blue jean skirts sewn out of multiple pairs of worn out blue jean pants. 

    I often think of a bunch of poles or nodes pulling at the creation of worn jeans.
  • The Pragmatism Node and being a cheapskate. This is also tied to just being poor and not being able to afford or wanting to afford new cloths. Likely need and want could be separated out into separate nodes. There is overlap here with other nodes.
  • Appreciation of the look, the Wabi connoisseur.
  • Marketability, the Stone Washed Node
  • concern for the environmental impact of cotton and consumerism, the Green Node
  • the Clueless Node. This is the node of people for whom the buying of new clothes is just a distraction from the rest of their lives, they don’t notice. 

These nodes are just like little elastic straps that pull on how we deal with our jeans or other objects. My old denim-type clothing is clearly elastically attached to each of these nodes. 

Certainly I am not the first in my interest in such things. But the earliest serious interest, and just about the only significant historical cultural manifestation that I know about was the period surround what Louise Cort calls “The Teabowl Wars” and the moves in Japan from the aesthetic of  glitzy teaware to wabi and move from connoisseurship of folk pottery to the purposefully making of wabi imbued wares. 

Relation to teaware’s shift from being curated from folk pots to purposefully made to be “funky”