What we've been up to in February

The Southside Pottery Workshop

Left to Right: VC Copper Blue-Green, VC Cobalt Blue, VC Taffy

We are slowly developing our glaze palate. The glaze kiln that came with the building is Bailey's down-draft gas kiln. An overwhelming percent of my highfire experience is with wood cross-draft and down-draft kilns. Learning to fire with gas (propane) has been challenging, but I think I finally have the hang of it. There were some glazes in the building when we bought it, but I clearly need to learn how to make my own. We’ve been referencing John Britt’s The Complete Guide to High-Fire Glazes, Val Cushing’s Cushing’s Handbook, 3rd ed, Glazy, and Digital Fire. 

One of the glazes that Jeff used and I really like is Val Cushing’s Taffy. I like the color and texture and it looks great in both the hot and cold areas of the kiln. After doing some reading, I learned that the base for the taffy glaze was the base for two other glazes that Jeff may have used. One is a copper blue-green and the other is a cobalt blue. The base is extremely simple:

• Cornwall Stone - 46g

• Whiting - 34g

• EPK - 20g

I fire the kiln with a heavy reduction between cones 012-08 and then hold a medium reduction up to cone 10. After cone 10 bends, I close up the kiln and let it cool naturally for around four days. I’ll be sure to share pots with these glazes as they come out of the kiln.

The Kleckner Archive

Jeff Kleckner's pots from Box 31

I’m back to unpacking, photographing, and repacking boxes of pottery. For those of you who are new to the Kleckner Archive, when we first acquired the space, the inside of the building was a bit overwhelming and mixed within 30+ years of stuff that is a time capsule of Jeff Kleckner’s work from his early years up until his passing in 2020. Quite simply there were pots everywhere. To make sense of the place I mapped it out into sections and any pots or ceramics related materials I found, were put in boxes and labeled with a code to indicate where they were. 

This is the first archive that I’ve created from scratch, so I did not have the foresight to photograph the pots before they went into boxes. My thought was that everything would fit in no more than a dozen boxes and that we could process them shortly after. Not only did it require closer to a hundred boxes, but the boxes ended up requiring far more space in the building than I had planned. A process I thought would take less than a year will most likely take me closer to 10. There is just so much to process and between my job, my family, and graduate school (I’m aiming to be the oldest person to graduate with a PhD at Lehigh University — joking), the time for archival work is limited. So…I’ve had to pivot a few times and I’m now unpacking boxes, photographing the pots, organizing the photos on a google drive, repacking the boxes, and then taking those boxes home to store somewhere that isn’t in the workshop. 

The box I opened recently (Box 31) came from an area downstairs that I called “the original wooden ware rack.” The pots appear to be demonstration pieces from his time teaching at Northampton Community College. If memory serves me correctly, there are a few more boxes to open with pots in a similar state. After everything is said and done, I may put these pieces on display in the workshop so that future students can look at and learn from them. 

The Neighborhood

Southside Pottery after one of this winter's many snowfalls

For the better part of a month and a half, life in the neighborhood has been shaped by a lot of snow and extreme cold. After we dug ourselves out (the first time), I took a walk through some of the streets south of Broadway. It was the first time I ventured out this way and I’m looking forward to future walks during the Spring, Summer, and Autumn. 

The sense of the neighborhood that you get from the studio is deeply influenced by the business of Broadway. It’s a throughway between South Bethlehem, Fountain Hill, and Emmaus. A lot of the traffic seems to be going to and from 378. However, once you’re off the main drag the neighborhood takes on a completely different feel. Granted, things can be a bit slower when cars, streets, and sidewalks are buried in snow, but the neighborhood had a calm to it I can only imagine/hope is there year round. On our side of South Bethlehem, there seems to be distinct corridors divided by 378, Broadway, Delaware Ave, and the Lehigh River. With luck, I will have time to explore them all for future newsletters.