The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Viewed laterally, the form tends toward the crisp, nearly square profile of a Staffordshire late-Georgian child’s mug, but as the walls descend in perfectly vertical contours, they swell at last into a convex base: an approximation of the ring-like
node between two hollow sections of a bamboo culm. This crucial detail of Minneapolis, Minnesota, potter Ernest Miller’s cylindrical mugs, like the slight domination of the handles over lips that they meet and exceed in height, is typical of
an aesthetic that embraces elements planar and static only to coax them into a gentle dynamism with less predictable details of composition. The latter, cultivated through systematic experimentation with material and atmospheric variables, might be
as simple as a ragged line that forms when a slip breaks over the edge of a foot and turns color from russet to gun-metal gray. As in the dynamic between the sharp edges of the canvas and the soft edges of nebulous rectangles in a Rothko painting,
nothing else is needed to activate the expressive potential of austerity. Nothing is needed, so nothing is added. “In the back of my mind,” Miller says, “I’m always thinking about the advice of the industrial designer Dieter
Rams: ‘The best design is just enough design.’”
Material and Technical Drive
Design in Miller’s work is to a significant degree materially and technically driven. While earning a BA in art at Eastern Illinois University in the 1990s, he experimented with reduction firing, but over the years that followed, he developed his
sophisticated low-key aesthetic principally in electric kilns. Not satisfied with glaze formulas available in manuals, he devoted much of his activity to technical exploration, particularly the layering of slips and glazes in the interest of transitions
in color or tone. A desire to expand the variables in his work through a change in firing atmosphere gradually gained momentum, and in the spring of 2020, with grant support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, he constructed a soda kiln. The project
was not just a means to an end, but rather a reflection of the obsession with problem-solving that accounts for Miller’s enduring attraction to ceramics. “I took it upon myself to design and build the kiln, including the burners,”
he explains. “It was an idea of self-reliance. I could have bought the burners. I could have bought the whole kiln, but if something breaks down, I know how to put it back together again.”
That kind of knowledge—technical, practical, materially oriented—has played an essential role in Miller’s work, but at the same time, he has consciously subordinated it to a concern for activating the expressive properties of form. In
that enterprise, techniques are like words: capable of conveying more complex emotional content when employed in sentences—sentences that are manifestly more than sums of their parts. For Miller, techniques—like the layering of glaze over
slip that causes edges of painted shapes on his covered boxes to feather-like smudged charcoal—do not substitute for expression, but they greatly facilitate it. “I have more freedom with a bigger vocabulary of pot forms and a bigger vocabulary
of techniques for making pots,” he explains. “I can decide what my pots need to say and give a more personal expression to them. I want to throw and alter. I want to facet. I want to use coils. I want to add slabs. I’m not going
to stick to just one thing. I’ll use any process necessary to get the end result as long as I enjoy the process.”
Kiln Influences
The process of firing the new soda kiln, a return to exploration of fundamentals that Miller likens to a “rebirth” for its challenge to build competency and then mastery from the ground up, has not eclipsed the importance of the electric kiln.
Rather, it has encouraged a creative dialogue between two equally compelling technologies. “Every time I think the soda kiln is my new favorite interest, I do something in the electric kiln that draws me back,” he observes. “I’m
trying to think of the advantages of one versus the other. Is a soda kiln all that necessary to produce the surfaces that I want? I explore different ideas, but they always feed back into one another. As I adapt to reduction in the soda kiln, some
of the ideas inform my use of the electric kiln. The technical experiments with my glazes and surfaces in the electric kiln can inform the soda-kiln ideas, too.”
Some differences between kiln influences are easy to spot, especially since Miller fires the same forms—among them faceted cups and bowls, covered boxes, and his distinctive garlic keepers—in both the electric and soda contexts. A high-iron
clay is common to all his pottery, and the slips employed have been purposely “tweaked” for universality, reducing the need for separate buckets in the studio. Limitation of variables is appropriate for another reason as well. Miller recognizes
the practical benefits of reining in the temptation to experiment endlessly. “As much as I like to explore,” he notes, “I also have to make sure I produce that kiln load of work to deliver to the gallery. You always have a mortgage
to pay.”
Process, Expression, and Inspiration
Among the forms that have become staples of Miller’s pottery, the faceted cups are perhaps most revealing of links between technical process and expression. Thrown then altered by squaring with boards while still on the wheel in a plastic state,
paddled to flatten the walls, and finally faceted into eight sides with a cheese cutter, the forms are simple, with defined planes that serve as panels for subtle effects of color and texture. Most distinctive, however, are the bases. “I started
flipping cups over and hand carving randomly to create feet,” Miller explains. “Sometimes I look at architecture, and something I thought of was the cantilever. How can I get part of this cup to cantilever over the edge, so if you were
to catch a glimpse of the cup out of the corner of your eye one side would be floating? How could I pull that off while still allowing it to sit on a tabletop securely? It’s basically reduced down almost to a tripod hidden underneath.”
By means of the irregularly carved feet, Miller not only breaks the gestalt—interjects an element that prevents the mind from grasping the cup in its entirety from a single perspective—but also introduces intangibility to the general effect
of geometry. The gaps between the feet form dark horizontal rectangles of shadow that play visibly against the vertical rectangles of the cup’s faceted sides. Shadows are elusive, incommensurable. Consequences of the absence of light are conducive
to metaphors of the invisible: spirit, consciousness, infinitude. Coupled with the visually confounding effects of the cantilever feet, the shadows beneath Miller’s cups invite contemplation of things well beyond the scope of strictly utilitarian
objects. “I’ve always felt that I learn a lot from pots when they’re living on a shelf,” he says. “I glance at them and catch these little views when I’m not focused directly on them. The cups will get twisted to
the side when you don’t see the front. They provide a little cantilever and a shadow, a nice dark shadow underneath. It’s simple, but I visually enjoy that.”
A Tactile Experience
While the faceted cups are designed to stimulate the eye and set in motion chains of free association, they also address a general sensory reductiveness that Miller finds all too common in contemporary experience. “The feet of the cups are for the
fingers to discover when picking up the piece,” he explains. “When making my work, I think of the touch screens and keyboards that fill our days, narrowing tactile experience. Maybe a cup or a plate can help the hands to rediscover what
they’re supposed to do. The cups have something for the hand to explore on the underside and at the sides and corners. Hands want that. The design of the cup is basically a playground for the fingers.”
Although Miller carefully considers the user of his pottery, his motive in creating it is, in the end, equally a personal matter: a processing of his own visual and tactile experiences, particularly those associated with architecture and machinery from
the rural region of Southern Illinois where he grew up. The garlic keepers, “vented with fenestration,” offer overt allusions to corn cribs, echoing their cylinder-and-cone format. The covered boxes are abstractions of barns—their
haylofts opened wide. The robust handles of faceted bowls take inspiration from a trestle bridge encountered while biking along railroad tracks. And the faceted cups, Miller speculates, “could have been bolted onto a cultivator. I’m thinking
of some kind of tool, something heavy: a little idea I play with in the back of my mind. No one else is going to get it, but that’s okay. My favorite design is design where you don’t really take into account that someone has thought it
through.”
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
Monthly Method: Thrown-and-Altered Lidded Box by Ernest Miller
The thrown-and-altered box has become a form of personal fascination due to its compositional and surface potential. I reference architectural features in the carved feet and knob, utilizing negative space, while experimenting with white-and-black surface
composition. My goal is to establish a dialog between the form and the surface.
Using a stoneware with grog, throw a 5-pound cylinder with a thick curved bottom and the lip folded toward the interior for the lid (1). Use a finger and gently push out four equidistant points while moving up the interior wall.
Next, use a pair of square bats to alter and compress the cylinder into a square shape (2). Start the process slowly by working alternate corners, making several passes around the cylinder and moving the clay. Measure the diagonal corner distance for
the lid with calipers. At a soft leather hard, refine the box shape using a paddle along with the addition of coils applied to the edges (3). Use a wide trimming tool to shave the exterior and refine the edges (4). Flip the box over. Use a series
of square dowels of various sizes to sketch cuts for the feet. Carve the foot interior then cut the feet with a fettling knife (5).
Using a 2½-pound ball of clay for the lid, throw a thick, shallow bowl to the caliper measurement and mark the four points (6). At the soft leather-hard stage, trim the lid and begin manipulating it by hand into a square, then further refining
it with a paddle (7). Flip the lid over on the box, mark the outer edge, and then cut the lid to fit. Attach a small addition of clay to the top center of the lid. At leather hard, use a fettling knife to cut the knob square and then cut the negative
space (8).
Let the box dry, then bisque fire it. I first dip a quick layer of white bisque slip, then use a pencil to draw a design. Use wax resist to mask the areas you want to remain white. Let the wax thoroughly dry, then brush on the black slip. Bisque
fire a second time, and apply a clear glaze before firing the piece to temperature.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Viewed laterally, the form tends toward the crisp, nearly square profile of a Staffordshire late-Georgian child’s mug, but as the walls descend in perfectly vertical contours, they swell at last into a convex base: an approximation of the ring-like node between two hollow sections of a bamboo culm. This crucial detail of Minneapolis, Minnesota, potter Ernest Miller’s cylindrical mugs, like the slight domination of the handles over lips that they meet and exceed in height, is typical of an aesthetic that embraces elements planar and static only to coax them into a gentle dynamism with less predictable details of composition. The latter, cultivated through systematic experimentation with material and atmospheric variables, might be as simple as a ragged line that forms when a slip breaks over the edge of a foot and turns color from russet to gun-metal gray. As in the dynamic between the sharp edges of the canvas and the soft edges of nebulous rectangles in a Rothko painting, nothing else is needed to activate the expressive potential of austerity. Nothing is needed, so nothing is added. “In the back of my mind,” Miller says, “I’m always thinking about the advice of the industrial designer Dieter Rams: ‘The best design is just enough design.’”
Material and Technical Drive
Design in Miller’s work is to a significant degree materially and technically driven. While earning a BA in art at Eastern Illinois University in the 1990s, he experimented with reduction firing, but over the years that followed, he developed his sophisticated low-key aesthetic principally in electric kilns. Not satisfied with glaze formulas available in manuals, he devoted much of his activity to technical exploration, particularly the layering of slips and glazes in the interest of transitions in color or tone. A desire to expand the variables in his work through a change in firing atmosphere gradually gained momentum, and in the spring of 2020, with grant support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, he constructed a soda kiln. The project was not just a means to an end, but rather a reflection of the obsession with problem-solving that accounts for Miller’s enduring attraction to ceramics. “I took it upon myself to design and build the kiln, including the burners,” he explains. “It was an idea of self-reliance. I could have bought the burners. I could have bought the whole kiln, but if something breaks down, I know how to put it back together again.”
That kind of knowledge—technical, practical, materially oriented—has played an essential role in Miller’s work, but at the same time, he has consciously subordinated it to a concern for activating the expressive properties of form. In that enterprise, techniques are like words: capable of conveying more complex emotional content when employed in sentences—sentences that are manifestly more than sums of their parts. For Miller, techniques—like the layering of glaze over slip that causes edges of painted shapes on his covered boxes to feather-like smudged charcoal—do not substitute for expression, but they greatly facilitate it. “I have more freedom with a bigger vocabulary of pot forms and a bigger vocabulary of techniques for making pots,” he explains. “I can decide what my pots need to say and give a more personal expression to them. I want to throw and alter. I want to facet. I want to use coils. I want to add slabs. I’m not going to stick to just one thing. I’ll use any process necessary to get the end result as long as I enjoy the process.”
Kiln Influences
The process of firing the new soda kiln, a return to exploration of fundamentals that Miller likens to a “rebirth” for its challenge to build competency and then mastery from the ground up, has not eclipsed the importance of the electric kiln. Rather, it has encouraged a creative dialogue between two equally compelling technologies. “Every time I think the soda kiln is my new favorite interest, I do something in the electric kiln that draws me back,” he observes. “I’m trying to think of the advantages of one versus the other. Is a soda kiln all that necessary to produce the surfaces that I want? I explore different ideas, but they always feed back into one another. As I adapt to reduction in the soda kiln, some of the ideas inform my use of the electric kiln. The technical experiments with my glazes and surfaces in the electric kiln can inform the soda-kiln ideas, too.”
Some differences between kiln influences are easy to spot, especially since Miller fires the same forms—among them faceted cups and bowls, covered boxes, and his distinctive garlic keepers—in both the electric and soda contexts. A high-iron clay is common to all his pottery, and the slips employed have been purposely “tweaked” for universality, reducing the need for separate buckets in the studio. Limitation of variables is appropriate for another reason as well. Miller recognizes the practical benefits of reining in the temptation to experiment endlessly. “As much as I like to explore,” he notes, “I also have to make sure I produce that kiln load of work to deliver to the gallery. You always have a mortgage to pay.”
Process, Expression, and Inspiration
Among the forms that have become staples of Miller’s pottery, the faceted cups are perhaps most revealing of links between technical process and expression. Thrown then altered by squaring with boards while still on the wheel in a plastic state, paddled to flatten the walls, and finally faceted into eight sides with a cheese cutter, the forms are simple, with defined planes that serve as panels for subtle effects of color and texture. Most distinctive, however, are the bases. “I started flipping cups over and hand carving randomly to create feet,” Miller explains. “Sometimes I look at architecture, and something I thought of was the cantilever. How can I get part of this cup to cantilever over the edge, so if you were to catch a glimpse of the cup out of the corner of your eye one side would be floating? How could I pull that off while still allowing it to sit on a tabletop securely? It’s basically reduced down almost to a tripod hidden underneath.”
By means of the irregularly carved feet, Miller not only breaks the gestalt—interjects an element that prevents the mind from grasping the cup in its entirety from a single perspective—but also introduces intangibility to the general effect of geometry. The gaps between the feet form dark horizontal rectangles of shadow that play visibly against the vertical rectangles of the cup’s faceted sides. Shadows are elusive, incommensurable. Consequences of the absence of light are conducive to metaphors of the invisible: spirit, consciousness, infinitude. Coupled with the visually confounding effects of the cantilever feet, the shadows beneath Miller’s cups invite contemplation of things well beyond the scope of strictly utilitarian objects. “I’ve always felt that I learn a lot from pots when they’re living on a shelf,” he says. “I glance at them and catch these little views when I’m not focused directly on them. The cups will get twisted to the side when you don’t see the front. They provide a little cantilever and a shadow, a nice dark shadow underneath. It’s simple, but I visually enjoy that.”
A Tactile Experience
While the faceted cups are designed to stimulate the eye and set in motion chains of free association, they also address a general sensory reductiveness that Miller finds all too common in contemporary experience. “The feet of the cups are for the fingers to discover when picking up the piece,” he explains. “When making my work, I think of the touch screens and keyboards that fill our days, narrowing tactile experience. Maybe a cup or a plate can help the hands to rediscover what they’re supposed to do. The cups have something for the hand to explore on the underside and at the sides and corners. Hands want that. The design of the cup is basically a playground for the fingers.”
Although Miller carefully considers the user of his pottery, his motive in creating it is, in the end, equally a personal matter: a processing of his own visual and tactile experiences, particularly those associated with architecture and machinery from the rural region of Southern Illinois where he grew up. The garlic keepers, “vented with fenestration,” offer overt allusions to corn cribs, echoing their cylinder-and-cone format. The covered boxes are abstractions of barns—their haylofts opened wide. The robust handles of faceted bowls take inspiration from a trestle bridge encountered while biking along railroad tracks. And the faceted cups, Miller speculates, “could have been bolted onto a cultivator. I’m thinking of some kind of tool, something heavy: a little idea I play with in the back of my mind. No one else is going to get it, but that’s okay. My favorite design is design where you don’t really take into account that someone has thought it through.”
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
Monthly Method: Thrown-and-Altered Lidded Box by Ernest Miller
The thrown-and-altered box has become a form of personal fascination due to its compositional and surface potential. I reference architectural features in the carved feet and knob, utilizing negative space, while experimenting with white-and-black surface composition. My goal is to establish a dialog between the form and the surface.
Using a stoneware with grog, throw a 5-pound cylinder with a thick curved bottom and the lip folded toward the interior for the lid (1). Use a finger and gently push out four equidistant points while moving up the interior wall.
Next, use a pair of square bats to alter and compress the cylinder into a square shape (2). Start the process slowly by working alternate corners, making several passes around the cylinder and moving the clay. Measure the diagonal corner distance for the lid with calipers. At a soft leather hard, refine the box shape using a paddle along with the addition of coils applied to the edges (3). Use a wide trimming tool to shave the exterior and refine the edges (4). Flip the box over. Use a series of square dowels of various sizes to sketch cuts for the feet. Carve the foot interior then cut the feet with a fettling knife (5).
Using a 2½-pound ball of clay for the lid, throw a thick, shallow bowl to the caliper measurement and mark the four points (6). At the soft leather-hard stage, trim the lid and begin manipulating it by hand into a square, then further refining it with a paddle (7). Flip the lid over on the box, mark the outer edge, and then cut the lid to fit. Attach a small addition of clay to the top center of the lid. At leather hard, use a fettling knife to cut the knob square and then cut the negative space (8).
Let the box dry, then bisque fire it. I first dip a quick layer of white bisque slip, then use a pencil to draw a design. Use wax resist to mask the areas you want to remain white. Let the wax thoroughly dry, then brush on the black slip. Bisque fire a second time, and apply a clear glaze before firing the piece to temperature.
Unfamiliar with any terms in this article? Browse our glossary of pottery terms!
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