Dear Moira Vincentelli,
I’ve red your article on the web with interest. Although there are a lot of
statements I’d like to agree, there are some I
don’t. But first some words about myself: I’m a
east-german traditional potter making wood fired and salt
glazed stoneware. You know, something that has been made first
some hundred years ago in Germany.
I had to smile a bit while reading:
"But perhaps much more significant to my argument is that
wood-fire kiln building is positioned as a heroic
‘macho’ activity and Leach writes evocatively about
that."
Living in a part of Germany, where many
studio potters are woodfirers, half male, half female, this
sounds very strange to me. In my experience women are not too
stupid to fire a woodfired kiln with excellent results, Sandra
Lockwood is an example that you know. The fact, that some
potters have a macho attitude working with the tool named wood
kiln might be true, but I think that there are reasons: you
have to tell your customer why those brown pots are more
expensive than those with bright shining colourful surfaces,
which they might recognise as much more nicely. And Leach lived
nearly a hundred years ago, influenced by japanese pottery and
society. I think I don’t need to tell something about the
womens place in Japanese society. But things have changed since
then. Today woodfiring is a well researched and documented part
of ceramics with a lot of developments during the last 30
years, leading to very lady-like kiln designs. You wrote that
»The firing is the climax of the potter’s labour,
and in a wood-fired kiln of any size it is a long and
exhausting process.« But actually nowadays it isn’t
necessarily so. There are statements of potters, men and women,
which are very different to the one above.
Karen Karnes: »The kiln I use is a
wonderful instrument. It is... more a low-key womans kiln than,
say, the anagama. My kiln is never in a rush, never histerical.
It just quietly asks that we move around feeding it...There is
a warm relationship between us.«
If you like, I can find more of this.
What I want to say ist, that there are no ceramic techniques
that are gender-special (sorry, my english is only old school
english, hope this is the correct word) in itself, they are
only gender-special through society. This is also true for
hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramics. There is simply no
gendered nature of ceramic technology. The problems that you
describe with development projects have a whole lot of reasons,
the lack of money and time are the most important ones. And
reading your article I see that with the two mentioned projects
the whole preparation was wrong, underestimating the complexity
of ceramic technology, aesthetics and society. Sending a potter
to east-Timor for 4 weeks and hoping this will have an effect
is a joke. And, one last word about kilns, a woodfired kiln
whichʻis large and nearly impossible to maintain at an
even temperature from top to bottom or front to back, even for
an expert wood-firer«Êis simply a foulty construction.
And looking at the photos on Arthur Rossers website I would say it just fails the needs. It
seems that there would have been a lot of possibilities to
choose a more »lady-like« kiln design.
So for being not misunderstood: your
article is very interesting and full of knowledge, but has some
parts (espacially concerning ceramic technology) that are
simply untrue. I found it a bit pity.
yours sincerely
M. Böhm
