pit fired pottery

More of my pottery, I made the mould for these by filling balloons with plaster, then making a negative plaster mould of the shape created.
These were then slipcast with white earthenware slip.
The object was just to learn to create our own moulds so these sat around my workshop for a while because I wasn't sure how I wanted to finish them.

After I left technical college I went on a weekend away with a local arts group and we planned a pit firing.

We dug a huge hole in the ground, lay our pots in with wood, sawdust, handfuls of salt, oxides, anything else we thought would burn.
Set fire to it and covered the pit with sheets of corrugated iron, then sat back and listened to the dull bangs as pots exploded, we really didn't expect anything to survive, least of all my fine slipcast pieces, but it was the heavier pots that blew up, probably the thickness of the clay, luckily mine were not near them or I would have lost them from shrapnel.








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