Reduction Fire

Several of us who work in Allen Griffin's studio in Shelby (Allen Griffin, Vicki Halloran, Ronnie Blackburn, and I) have been working on pieces to fire in our friend--and learned colleague--Gene Young's gas kiln.  In a gas kiln, one has the opportunity to fire at reduction, which means that the oxygen is removed from the atmosphere in the kiln at certain points in the firing.  The glazes and clay bodies react differently than they do at oxidation, which is what we normally do in the electric kiln at the studio.

This project involved making the pieces, bisque firing them, glazing them with the glazes that generally give good results in this type of kiln, and then packing them carefully for transport.  On Friday, Allen, Ronnie, and I took everything over to Gene's to load the kiln.


Before we could load, we had to do some work on the kiln shelves to remove some old glaze so that our pieces wouldn't stick to the shelves.  Checking out the shelves is a normal step before every fire, but this time, the work was more involved than we anticipated.  At the left, Ronnie and Allen are working hard to try to finish before the rain started.


Once the shelves were fixed, we sorted all the pieces by size inside the shed to keep them out of the rain.

When you load a kiln, it is best to put pieces of the same height on a shelf.  The idea is to use the space in the kiln as efficiently as possible.  In other words, you try to cram as much stuff inside as possible without allowing any of the pieces to touch.

This kiln is deep enough for two shelves to fit front to back.  Starting with the bottom shelf in the back, we worked our way forward and up shelf by shelf.  

At the right, the kiln is loaded and ready to go.


In my next post, I will let you know how it went.  I hope to have some pictures of some really good looking pottery!