Alaskan Mud

 I spent the last five weeks commercial fishing for salmon in Alaska.  It was a season that was slow and rather uneventful. Typically a season in Bristol Bay is full of madness, a bit of danger, lots of work, and no sleep.  Still, every year that I have fished I have always left with a sense of newness.  At the end of the season I decided to bring back mud from the bay. My hope is that I can “cut” it with other clays and make a “Bristol Bay clay” that I can fire in our wood kilns.

I hiked out to the bay, where the tundra meets the ocean, and harvested.  It was a dismal day, rainy and cold, but my spirits were high thinking about what this earth could possibly do.  Will I put it in a shino, is it going to be plastic enough to throw, what temperature range will it fire to, what happens if i cut it with porcelain, how can I find out what exactly is in this earth???  So many questions, so many possibilities.  I stuffed it into ziplock bags and packed it back to the boat, into my duffel bag, to bring back to Florida…  

The one thing about the ceramic tradition that is very exciting is the science of it all.  I am no master of raw materials yet, or even remotely close to being a practitioner of the scientific method, but am endlessly curious.  We fire in two weeks and I will test a few very small pieces in this firing.  I’m prepared to find bloated or slumped test cups, but whatever happens at least I will know.  Here is to the search!!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Advertisement