Where do ideas like The square potter’s wheel, and a Flame throwing pipe organ come from. An Outline for a talk at NCECA 2027. This wriiten set of nots should be considered a work in progress rather than anything finished.
An understanding of undergraduate critiques of the minimalist sculpture type known a s functional pottery. Does the rim look like it just happened or was it made the way that it is with intent? Is it loose throwing or sloppy? Was it sloppy with intent? Or better does it appear to be sloppy with intent? Is actual intent necessary for interpretation? Once it looks intentional meaning, rationale, seems there to discern.
What parts of the design have not been considered? Or what parts look as if they have not been considered?
New ideas, and all innovation happen in the same space. They flow in the space of idea not yet considered. John Gil in his Red Clay Rambler interview talks about things happening in the grey or grey area. For me, what he describes is the space between words, outside conventional definition. In my minds it is easy to segment the realms that ideas not yet considered exist in. But these realms in some sense they are all the same. Just the same. Lets segment these. But keep in mind that the segmentation is just a map of reality. Words are an imperfect model of reality. The map is not reality.
I have been married to Gail Busch for 45 years. We frequently have big disagreements.
Where exactly does blue end and green begin?
We each have our own color map. The colors do not change, yet our perception and ideas about them are not identical..
Outlandish, Is the outlandish seeming is sometimes indandiish?
Old English utlendisc, from ūtland (“foreign land, land abroad”) (English outland).
concentric
eccentric,,, this surely applies to this wheel.
Lets go through some of them as the relate to clay.
Tools
Tools not yet considered as appropriate for the use by you you will use them for. Examples
Sand Blaster used by Kurt Weiser
Air Chisel on glass by Janusz Walentynowicz
CinvaRam Brick Press for making pots by Louis Katz
Unusual hand tools. Student Exercise.
Materials
Materials discarded as impractical or not yet considered for the use you put them to.
Portland Cement glazes (Ceramics Monthly)
Calcium Chloride for surface decoration
Gerstley Borate as clay ingredient to promote scumming
Chunky Copper wire Oxide
Corn
Sewage Treatment Plant Ash
Discarded sludge from granite countertop cutting.
USe of Cobalt Oxide as a flux. (Ceramic MAterials Workshop)
Use of Manganese Dioxide as a flux (Basalt Ware Wedgewood)
Techniques that won’t work.
Clay on welded wire fencing
Slipcast Glass
Difficult forms
Glaze faults
Sperry platters
Crawled Shino
My student’s teapot
Absurd Amalgams.
Cutting molds with saws rather than making separate pieces. Who is the person doing this today? Is this really just a different tool application?
Urban Teapots
Is this new? Shang Dynasty Bronzes.
New ways to do old things.
Walk around the pot rather than spin the pot. THis is really an old way to do it.
Make Chrome thin Pinks with Zinc (Ceramic Materials Workshop research)
Inbetweens happen between words and concepts. There is no hard like between blue and green yet we treat them as if they are distinct. Many of the most interesting colors occur in the area where these colors approach these verbal distinctions. People that think as if colors are distinct live outside of subtle use.
But the line between function and non function is a similar line. Something pleasurable to look at serves a function. In my Uncle Bernie’s verbiage, designed to poke fun at contemporary abstract sculpture, sculpture modulates space. Paintings act as decorations for walls. The function of art is as objects of contemplation, avenues for expression. It is this line, and how we define it in Ceramics, that was the first place where I see idea as the realm where I started to innovate. What is function? What functions are we forgetting about? What do we mean by it.
What is Ceramics? Most will tell you its a class of materials. But even then it depends on who you ask. A chemist will tell you “Metal Oxides”, an engineer will tell you materials to hold or withstand high heat, an NCECAist might tell. you clay and glazes. Glass they might see as a grey area?
Me? I sufferer from Meglomania Ceramica, I claim it all, graphite, granite, portland cement, glass, silica gels, and yes clay.
But Ceramics is also a way or group of ways of looking at design, ways of working, a history or historys.
You, You are Ceramics. Ceramics is a community or maybe communities. I call members of this community Clayers,
How you look at Ceramics influences how you see what you can call ceramics. How you define function limits what you call functional Ceramics. Even people who are serious about making functional pottery understand this. Mark Hewitts titling a jar “umbrella holders” is a clear sign of this.
As an exercise, perhaps in absurdity, but certainly as a way to grow, to come to grips with the illusional order word definitions inflict on the world, I inflate definitions until they encompass as much of reality as I can muster. I truly am tired of the hierarchy in the arts. I refer to painting as ceramic and other pigments stuck in place by a binder. This converts those cave paintings in Lascaux and elsewhere from the craft of painting to the Art of Ceramics. The cave walls, rock, are ceramics too. Lets make sure that the art historians get their terminology straight. Shall we?
Better get to the wheel. What parts of the wheel to we just accept and live with? The stable axis. Some of us do understand that steady speed is not so necessary, that is if we throw for long on a Leach Wheel or make big things on a kick wheel. Steady speed is not needed but spinning on a stable axis never gets questioned.
Kurt
ntroduction to the pieces that made this happen.
I have been a conceptual artist since before I discovered clay and before I knew what a conceptual artist was. So it should come as no surprise as we look back on my over 50 years with clay with an analytic eye that even early on concept had become a central part of my work. However for me clay is visual and despite my conceptual drive, for the most part for I needed my work to also be visually engaging .
Looking back over a lifetime of clay, I have never been comfortable with the restrictions that definitions of words put on us. Early on this was the word “function”. What could we make that has no function? Why make it? Even a painting has to function. My ideas of what is “functional ceramics” has grown over the years. I have made ceramic signs, door stops, brick, and counter weights. I have tried to make them all beautiful.
What is “ceramics”. We have the classic clayer definition, things made with clay, but then there is the chemists definition and the engineers definition. Suffering from “meglomaniacal ceramic” I count all of them, cement, rock, graphite, clay , glass and all ceramic based electronics and all art referencing them as part of my media.
We are left out of Art History for the most part. That is because Art History mostly surrounds Painting History. We, clayers, have a shared history that can be seen as separate. Clay is that history. We have processes, aesthetics, materials, and tools. They are ceramic. We are a community. Suppliers, collectors, makers of toilets and brick, the public that comes to our openings are part of us. NCECA is ceramic. We are clay. I use the word “Clayers” for this community. Its not inclusive enough for 2026, I am considering dropping Clayers for Ceracats.
Consequently I have made paintings that I see as clay. Some were painted with ceramic pigments suspended in oil. They are in some ways direct descendants of some of those early ceramic objects, the earthen pigmented paintings on the cave walls in Lascaux. But because my painting of a burner safety system is ceramic subject mattter, it is ceramics. It was not done using ceramic pigments. But I used a torch to alter its coloration. And then there is its subject matter. Clay.
Kilns were early subjects for me to make. They are vessels most often made of clay. The flame throwing pipe organ was a stretch, but I used a ceramic fiber kiln as the ignitor when in Kansas City. At the Archie Bray and the test performance at The Island University the kiln was made of actual clay.
We are blessed with a media with lots of aspects to it. Tool innvoation is part of clay. Whether this is the Giffin Grip, the Train Kiln, the Noborigama, this innovation is part of us.
Innovation often seems to move a particular part of the media forward. Usually when we use that word, we describe new things that exist outside the realm of refinement. Usually innovation happens in the inbetweens; between ideas and concepts, between fields, between tools, or outside of arbitrary limitation. Refinement in my head raises the pinnecle . Innovation broadens the base.
Going to school in Kansas City at The Art Institute in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s there was a lot of critiquing of functional pottery. When I became a teacher it was important for me to understand what was happening in those critques, how they were organized. What were the teachers looking for? A main priniciple of the Baus Haus was that “Every part of a design should be considered”. For me, this is close to truth. I think that “Every part of a design should look as it was considered.” You do not have to actually have considered it in order for it to be a success. Critiques of pots in Kansas City looked for the unconsidered or ilconsidered parts of the pot. They pointed them out. Sometheys they came with suggestions.
This principle, “what has not been considered” is a mirror of how I look at innovation. I often ask, What is unchanging, and how can I change it. Round pots are turned oval. Bernard Leach gives directions for this in “A Potter’s Book”. But the reason for round is the stable axis of the wheel. It just about begs for fiddling with, for play, for innovation, for consideration.
Ham Radio
I will not bore you with radio stuff, but Pete Juliano a radio homebrewer says, “When you know stuff you can do stuff”. He designs and builds radios. They are to my mind sculptures. Each one is different but expressive, innovative, interesting. He is amazing.
Early on I made it my business to know stuff. Really it was as much as I could. I had read every ceramics book I could get my hands on by the time I entered college. I was not a student who earned good grades, but it would be a mistake to think that my Chemistry, Physics, or Math classes went in one ear, got tested and then out the other. I scoured the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics for applicable information. This learning has been very helpful. I have never stopped learning. Sometimes now I have to relearn things I have forgotten. I am thankful that relearning is still faster than learning the first time. I am currently working on radio electronics. Really understanding complex impedances is difficult, the Smith Chart can seem diabolically tough. I have no idea how it will encorporate into ceramics. Almost everything else has.
But then there is “How to Do Stuff”. If you can’t build the thing, you might not be able to to have it. I have learned how to put stuff together. Hand skills, assembly, machining, building electronics, they really are knowing stuff also.
Sometime around 2011 I got involved with an easy to learn and use microcontroller platform called Arduino. It rapidly inserted itself into my work. Arduino is meant as a development platform for microcontrollers and can be used to take inputs, like switchs, sensors, clocks and use them to determine outputs like motors, lights, sounds, text. I used it for remote controlled brick. But mostly it was just and educational platform for me. I taught students to use them to control lights, sound, motion and take inputs.
I can throw nice flower petal like bowls by shaking my hands as I throw. Sometime in the mid 1990’s I built a wheel that does the shaking for you. The wheel head goes up and down 5 times a revolution. You can throw cylinders on it but it shakes almost any other form apart. Its an interesting gimmic. It owes its life partly to Ralph Cheifo’s (sp) reciprocating potter’s wheel. I got the idea to put a cam on a pivotable wheel shaft with flat faces and built a quick prototype square wheel. The pivot was not in the right place but my limited test with it showed me that what I was thinking was possible. It just needed work. About 20 years later I built a wheel with the pivot on another axis but parallel to the wheel axis. The wheel needed a drive mechanism that could handle the piviot. I decided on a small gear motor that I could move with the wheel head. It was simple. I needed something to control its speed, I used the Arduino microcontroller.
Which direction do you throw in? Some like clockwise, some counterclockwise. A few can throw in both directions. This wheel has a capability of going for a certain amount of time clockwise, and then a certain amount of time counterclockwise. You can set the direction, the speed, and a pause, and then another direction, speed and pause, alternating back and forth until you turn it off. So long as there is significant forward movement each cycle its not that hard to throw on.
The multiside mechanism works on a cam, really a set of carriage bolts mounted on the rim of the wheel head, and a rubbing block. The return is on a set of springs. Because of the arrangement of the 12 carriage bolts you can easily make semetrical pots with 12 sides, 6 sides, 4 sides, and theoretically 3 sides. As of this writing I have not tried the three sided setting. I am scared of it. 4 sides was difficult. If you want information on the wheel feel free to contact me or visit my square wheel resource page on my wiki at:
Square wheel online resources: https://louiskatz.net/w/pmwiki.php?n=Main.NCECA2027ResourcesForSquareWheel
