Unless I am extremely different than most in pottery, we are all first disillusioned by the belief that we can make pottery that will connect us to people across the nation—if not the world. We also think that we can run a completely successful
pottery business, which is everything we can possibly need and not burn ourselves out in the process of doing that. We also think that our pottery business can pay for our bills, groceries, healthcare, all our financial needs, support a house, and
possibly a family. And all of this can take place because of our undying love for clay and craft.
In reality (or maybe it is just me?), we are just obsessed with clay and making; we will make anything and everything. It is not until much later that many of us realize that we actually need to make pots for ourselves, to connect with who we are and
what is meaningful and true for us, and not to make pottery for others. We find—through mostly trial and error—that when we make pottery for ourselves, the work is better and more pure. It is more thoughtful when more emotion is imbued
into the work and we are making objects parallel to our own self-discovery.
Newer potters are often left with piles of pots that are effectively our journey of self-discovery through clay. I have personally filled four houses with pots in this manner. And a common trap for many of us is to think that we must find something profitable
to do with them. That something is often sales. We set up booths at local farmer’s markets, have little displays at coffee shops, or even occupy a shelf or two at a local gallery.
Both the easiest and worst thing to do here is to pay attention to what sells and start making more of those selling objects. The worst thing to do is to let capitalism invade our love of creation by paying a little-too-close attention to what sells.
The final evolution of this process is to be a vendor at craft markets, selling only the things that have sold in your local area and not what we love making in the style that resonates with who we are. If that happens, we end up making things that
sell and not things for our own joy, self-discovery, and the love of the craft.
To this end, potters often think they need larger kilns. More pots mean more sales, right? And on the infinite expansion model that is capitalism, the more we make, the more we sell, the bigger we grow, and the happier we are. I am here to argue the opposite,
specifically for beginner potters or ones that can relate to the train of thought outlined above.
One of the worst things that a new potter can do is get a large kiln for the sake of energy efficiency and element conservation and then feel obligated to fill it. To fill it means putting several weeks’ worth of throwing and trimming into the entire
kiln while also testing new glazes and forms throughout. Then, as a new potter, you open the kiln and see 90%+ disappointment and quite a bit of money’s worth of clay, glazes, and time wasted. It is one of the most disheartening components of
clay craft to experience—losing an entire kiln’s worth of clay, glaze, and hours all at once. To that end, I think that small kilns should have a much larger role in pottery than they do. And using one should be common practice for new
potters, explicitly, as a standard.
For example, I fire a Skutt KM-614 a couple hundred times a year. It is a small kiln, and its turn-around time/space manages most of my glaze and pottery idea testing. It will hold, at most, 8 mugs, 5 mugs and 1 bowl, or possibly 3 mugs and 2 bowls. You
get the idea; it doesn’t hold much. But it does let me try things out with a one-day turn-around time, punish me with minimal loss if it was a bad idea (I have quite a few of those), and small kilns do so with normal or slightly above-average
receptacle amperage.
Small kilns can fire to cone 6 and be cool again within 23–24 hours. My small kiln allows me to test 40–50 glaze tiles in one day. It allows me to fire off small batches of mugs if someone needs a fast birthday present. It lets me develop
glazes and really polish them into something nice (while testing them on the forms I have in mind) before committing to a full load of pottery in a larger kiln—often a week’s worth of time and several hundred dollar’s worth of clay.
As such, I fire my small kiln 200 or so times a year and a larger Skutt 1027 only three to four times per year, after working out exactly what glaze I want to use and how I want it to look on the forms that I make.
Part II
Philosophically, I think that there are a few dangers when first learning pottery (aside from actual physical dangers). These are:
Making work in a vacuum or a closed environment and without exposure to successful muses/influence.
Making work without iteration by constructive criticism/critique.
Making work without community facilitates the first two points.
Making work on a large scale without testing ideas or glazes first in smaller batches.
With these in mind, I think that almost every newish potter needs a small handful of things/thoughts to guide them in their early years in pottery. The goal of pottery, at least for me, is to find myself through expression in clay. Find the work that
represents me—explicitly seeking to find my voice in clay.
When faced with sales versus finding your voice in clay, there needs to be some self-preserving steps in place and somewhat of a protective mindset for your journey.
Throw out the idea of selling your pots, especially early on in learning. Throw this right out the door and never look at it again. The thought of making pottery just to be sold is one of the scariest concepts in clay, as you are letting the consumer
define what you make and how you express yourself. Do not let clay capitalism seep into your fingertips. This also means to let go of the idea of doing farmer’s markets, art booths, etc., early on. It will be directly competing with you finding
your voice in clay, as finances will whisper in your ear, “Keep making that thing that sells.” Explicitly let go of the idea of making money on your self-discovery through clay.
Throw out the idea of a large kiln and using it to make a huge number of pots. And with that, gain freedom from filling it and firing several weeks’ worth of work at once. Gain freedom from the loss of 40+ hours of effort just to try out one or
two ideas.
Get a small kiln. Be prepared to fire it often and let go of any ideas of what you wish a pot would have been. Let go of work and ideas that you were attached to or emotionally invested in, but instead, acknowledge that you are doing so with minimal time
and clay or glaze invested per firing.
Find a community and be picky about who is in your community. Find people who are very successful and are looking to help contribute to the next generation of artists. Be humble and honest about your own work. Do not solicit a community that just tells
you things you want to hear or feeds you toxic positivity. If all a group does is pat you on the back and tell you good things, you never grow or look at your work critically. Be incredibly wary of this, as it caters to your ego but does absolutely
nothing for your skillset or expression in clay.
Finally, seek actual, genuine criticism. Seek critique of your work from minds that you trust to know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, almost everyone that has held a mass-produced coffee cup from a big-box store thinks that they are well informed
about pottery, but I assure you that they are not. Seek knowledgeable, wise, slow, iterative criticism. Let go of your ego and emotional attachment to pots that you make for the sake of learning what you can improve and how you would like the next
renditions to be better. Seek improvement in your own work. How can each piece be better next time? How can it be an expression of you, especially when held in another’s hands? What facets of it can be improved upon?
These questions, asked honestly and without pride or ego, will result in the fastest improvement of skill and execution of ideas—along with a good community, healthy critiquing, and a small kiln.
Small Kilns
The Skutt KM-614 runs on a slightly beefy standard receptacle. Instead of 15 amps, it needs 20 and often on a 30A breaker. It can typically have two levels of standard mug/bowl heights, and fit 7–8 or so mugs—3 on the bottom row (with one
not under the thermocouple). The Skutt KM-614 inner chamber is approximately 11 × 11 inches at the opening and 13½ inches high with a total of 0.8 cubic feet. It likely requires an electrician to install a custom receptacle and breaker for
it, but not on the order of 220 volts.
Another small kiln (smaller, even) is the L&L Plug-N-Fire. It is a cone-10 electric kiln that can operate on a standard 15-amp circuit. The internal space is 8 × 8 inches square and 9 inches high, with a total of 0.3 cubic feet. In my opinion, 3 mugs fit in there easily. And if you’re good at Tetris, 4 mugs fit as well.
Having recently seen a number of these kilns pop up on social media, other potters echo my sentiment about firing a test kiln before committing to a larger body of work: Tim See notes, “I’ve been doing my tests, rather than waiting or guessing.
I’m saving time and my work by just coming up with crap and running it through the kiln.”
However, there are some drawbacks. The individual whose brain I pick most about kilns, Scott Campbell, makes some strong counter-points: “The gist of the issue is that pottery requires a certain length of time to fire. So having a very small kiln
that has the capability to fire much more quickly is a wasted advantage. You still have to fire slowly, or otherwise, you will have issues with your pottery. The burnout needed for impurities takes time. So, running a very small kiln more slowly than
it is capable of firing for basically the same extended time as a large kiln ends up costing roughly the same amount of electricity. The small kiln will obviously be a bit more efficient than a large kiln but that is somewhat offset by a 240-volt
appliance being slightly more efficient than a 120-volt appliance. It seems counter-intuitive, but the difference is usually quite negligible. For that reason, my wife and I got rid of our test kiln and fired everything in our large kiln. Even for
very small tests when the kiln is essentially empty. When we tracked the electricity costs, they were basically the same. Plus, the advantage of a large kiln is that you can, of course, put more stuff in the kiln (when needed) and that would again
save you money in the long run. Firing a small kiln multiple times is obviously more expensive than firing a large kiln once. Like owning a Maserati to drive around town but the speed limits mean your car is really no better than my piece-of-crap
car because we both end up going the same speed and getting to places in the same amount of time.
That said, there are obviously many applications where a fast firing is not counter-productive, such as overglazes. So, a small kiln is great and extremely helpful for many folks.”
For my argument, a small kiln has served me far more than a larger one; however, I have and use both. I fire the smaller one likely 50 times more than the larger one, but my entire niche is developing glazes and ceramic technology, which often involves
testing 10–20 glaze formulations a day in downtime between teaching chemistry classes or labs. Additionally, a larger kiln costs $4000–5000 plus significant wiring and electrical panel work for it to run. It often requires significant
venting as well. A small kiln costs between $1000–2000 and, in some cases, can run on a standard 15-amp wall receptacle.
Whatever your choice in kilns, seek out healthy criticism, an engaging community, iterative improvement in your work, and try to avoid letting capitalism creep into your fingertips when learning clay.
The author Ryan Coppage is currently chemistry faculty at the University of Richmond. He fiddles with various glaze projects and makes a reasonable number of pots. To see more, visit www.ryancoppage.com.
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Part I
Unless I am extremely different than most in pottery, we are all first disillusioned by the belief that we can make pottery that will connect us to people across the nation—if not the world. We also think that we can run a completely successful pottery business, which is everything we can possibly need and not burn ourselves out in the process of doing that. We also think that our pottery business can pay for our bills, groceries, healthcare, all our financial needs, support a house, and possibly a family. And all of this can take place because of our undying love for clay and craft.
In reality (or maybe it is just me?), we are just obsessed with clay and making; we will make anything and everything. It is not until much later that many of us realize that we actually need to make pots for ourselves, to connect with who we are and what is meaningful and true for us, and not to make pottery for others. We find—through mostly trial and error—that when we make pottery for ourselves, the work is better and more pure. It is more thoughtful when more emotion is imbued into the work and we are making objects parallel to our own self-discovery.
Newer potters are often left with piles of pots that are effectively our journey of self-discovery through clay. I have personally filled four houses with pots in this manner. And a common trap for many of us is to think that we must find something profitable to do with them. That something is often sales. We set up booths at local farmer’s markets, have little displays at coffee shops, or even occupy a shelf or two at a local gallery.
Both the easiest and worst thing to do here is to pay attention to what sells and start making more of those selling objects. The worst thing to do is to let capitalism invade our love of creation by paying a little-too-close attention to what sells. The final evolution of this process is to be a vendor at craft markets, selling only the things that have sold in your local area and not what we love making in the style that resonates with who we are. If that happens, we end up making things that sell and not things for our own joy, self-discovery, and the love of the craft.
To this end, potters often think they need larger kilns. More pots mean more sales, right? And on the infinite expansion model that is capitalism, the more we make, the more we sell, the bigger we grow, and the happier we are. I am here to argue the opposite, specifically for beginner potters or ones that can relate to the train of thought outlined above.
One of the worst things that a new potter can do is get a large kiln for the sake of energy efficiency and element conservation and then feel obligated to fill it. To fill it means putting several weeks’ worth of throwing and trimming into the entire kiln while also testing new glazes and forms throughout. Then, as a new potter, you open the kiln and see 90%+ disappointment and quite a bit of money’s worth of clay, glazes, and time wasted. It is one of the most disheartening components of clay craft to experience—losing an entire kiln’s worth of clay, glaze, and hours all at once. To that end, I think that small kilns should have a much larger role in pottery than they do. And using one should be common practice for new potters, explicitly, as a standard.
For example, I fire a Skutt KM-614 a couple hundred times a year. It is a small kiln, and its turn-around time/space manages most of my glaze and pottery idea testing. It will hold, at most, 8 mugs, 5 mugs and 1 bowl, or possibly 3 mugs and 2 bowls. You get the idea; it doesn’t hold much. But it does let me try things out with a one-day turn-around time, punish me with minimal loss if it was a bad idea (I have quite a few of those), and small kilns do so with normal or slightly above-average receptacle amperage.
Small kilns can fire to cone 6 and be cool again within 23–24 hours. My small kiln allows me to test 40–50 glaze tiles in one day. It allows me to fire off small batches of mugs if someone needs a fast birthday present. It lets me develop glazes and really polish them into something nice (while testing them on the forms I have in mind) before committing to a full load of pottery in a larger kiln—often a week’s worth of time and several hundred dollar’s worth of clay. As such, I fire my small kiln 200 or so times a year and a larger Skutt 1027 only three to four times per year, after working out exactly what glaze I want to use and how I want it to look on the forms that I make.
Part II
Philosophically, I think that there are a few dangers when first learning pottery (aside from actual physical dangers). These are:
With these in mind, I think that almost every newish potter needs a small handful of things/thoughts to guide them in their early years in pottery. The goal of pottery, at least for me, is to find myself through expression in clay. Find the work that represents me—explicitly seeking to find my voice in clay.
When faced with sales versus finding your voice in clay, there needs to be some self-preserving steps in place and somewhat of a protective mindset for your journey.
Throw out the idea of selling your pots, especially early on in learning. Throw this right out the door and never look at it again. The thought of making pottery just to be sold is one of the scariest concepts in clay, as you are letting the consumer define what you make and how you express yourself. Do not let clay capitalism seep into your fingertips. This also means to let go of the idea of doing farmer’s markets, art booths, etc., early on. It will be directly competing with you finding your voice in clay, as finances will whisper in your ear, “Keep making that thing that sells.” Explicitly let go of the idea of making money on your self-discovery through clay.
Throw out the idea of a large kiln and using it to make a huge number of pots. And with that, gain freedom from filling it and firing several weeks’ worth of work at once. Gain freedom from the loss of 40+ hours of effort just to try out one or two ideas.
Get a small kiln. Be prepared to fire it often and let go of any ideas of what you wish a pot would have been. Let go of work and ideas that you were attached to or emotionally invested in, but instead, acknowledge that you are doing so with minimal time and clay or glaze invested per firing.
Find a community and be picky about who is in your community. Find people who are very successful and are looking to help contribute to the next generation of artists. Be humble and honest about your own work. Do not solicit a community that just tells you things you want to hear or feeds you toxic positivity. If all a group does is pat you on the back and tell you good things, you never grow or look at your work critically. Be incredibly wary of this, as it caters to your ego but does absolutely nothing for your skillset or expression in clay.
Finally, seek actual, genuine criticism. Seek critique of your work from minds that you trust to know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, almost everyone that has held a mass-produced coffee cup from a big-box store thinks that they are well informed about pottery, but I assure you that they are not. Seek knowledgeable, wise, slow, iterative criticism. Let go of your ego and emotional attachment to pots that you make for the sake of learning what you can improve and how you would like the next renditions to be better. Seek improvement in your own work. How can each piece be better next time? How can it be an expression of you, especially when held in another’s hands? What facets of it can be improved upon?
These questions, asked honestly and without pride or ego, will result in the fastest improvement of skill and execution of ideas—along with a good community, healthy critiquing, and a small kiln.
Small Kilns
The Skutt KM-614 runs on a slightly beefy standard receptacle. Instead of 15 amps, it needs 20 and often on a 30A breaker. It can typically have two levels of standard mug/bowl heights, and fit 7–8 or so mugs—3 on the bottom row (with one not under the thermocouple). The Skutt KM-614 inner chamber is approximately 11 × 11 inches at the opening and 13½ inches high with a total of 0.8 cubic feet. It likely requires an electrician to install a custom receptacle and breaker for it, but not on the order of 220 volts.
Another small kiln (smaller, even) is the L&L Plug-N-Fire. It is a cone-10 electric kiln that can operate on a standard 15-amp circuit. The internal space is 8 × 8 inches square and 9 inches high, with a total of 0.3 cubic feet. In my opinion, 3 mugs fit in there easily. And if you’re good at Tetris, 4 mugs fit as well.
However, there are some drawbacks. The individual whose brain I pick most about kilns, Scott Campbell, makes some strong counter-points: “The gist of the issue is that pottery requires a certain length of time to fire. So having a very small kiln that has the capability to fire much more quickly is a wasted advantage. You still have to fire slowly, or otherwise, you will have issues with your pottery. The burnout needed for impurities takes time. So, running a very small kiln more slowly than it is capable of firing for basically the same extended time as a large kiln ends up costing roughly the same amount of electricity. The small kiln will obviously be a bit more efficient than a large kiln but that is somewhat offset by a 240-volt appliance being slightly more efficient than a 120-volt appliance. It seems counter-intuitive, but the difference is usually quite negligible. For that reason, my wife and I got rid of our test kiln and fired everything in our large kiln. Even for very small tests when the kiln is essentially empty. When we tracked the electricity costs, they were basically the same. Plus, the advantage of a large kiln is that you can, of course, put more stuff in the kiln (when needed) and that would again save you money in the long run. Firing a small kiln multiple times is obviously more expensive than firing a large kiln once. Like owning a Maserati to drive around town but the speed limits mean your car is really no better than my piece-of-crap car because we both end up going the same speed and getting to places in the same amount of time.
That said, there are obviously many applications where a fast firing is not counter-productive, such as overglazes. So, a small kiln is great and extremely helpful for many folks.”
For my argument, a small kiln has served me far more than a larger one; however, I have and use both. I fire the smaller one likely 50 times more than the larger one, but my entire niche is developing glazes and ceramic technology, which often involves testing 10–20 glaze formulations a day in downtime between teaching chemistry classes or labs. Additionally, a larger kiln costs $4000–5000 plus significant wiring and electrical panel work for it to run. It often requires significant venting as well. A small kiln costs between $1000–2000 and, in some cases, can run on a standard 15-amp wall receptacle.
Whatever your choice in kilns, seek out healthy criticism, an engaging community, iterative improvement in your work, and try to avoid letting capitalism creep into your fingertips when learning clay.
Unfamiliar with any terms in this article? Browse our glossary of pottery terms!
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