Waste Materials Course at Brickfield 

Based at an active china clay mine, Brickfield is Rose's incredible heritage/community project where she uses mining waste and natural foraged materials to create bricks in the traditional method.

 

This has grown into sharing her knowledge of found and recycled materials with artists and makers in this amazing week-long course. 

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Shout out to April, Amy, Lou, Alex, Claire and my mum for enabling me to afford this course xx

Aside from falling in love with the alchemy and primality of the wood firing after my Norwegian adventure, my main reason for joining this course was to learn about glazes, particularly from found/recycled materials. I was lucky enough to buy the contents of a potter's studio who was giving up her practise earlier this year, and so find myself with a LOT of raw materials - a lot of the gear and literally no idea. 

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I am particularly wanting to make more of my work as local as possible. Pottery feels like a conversation with the ground we walk on and to make the finishing decoration as much as part of that conversation feels right. I already use a Cornish clay from St Agnes but being able to make my own glazes from materials collected sustainably from the landscape would be dreamy. Glaze is inherently highly chemical - it's all pure minerals - but to have a clearer idea of each ingredient and where they've come from feels important.

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I am also extremely interested in ash glazes and with Hugo's wood turning - we have a lot of specific wood's sawdust ready to turn into ash for glazes but I needed more information about how, what, where etc. 

 

For a day-by-day breakdown of activities, check out my blog post!

​I didn't anticipate learning about making clay bodies from various mining waste and how diverse they could be. Using raw china clay, ball clay, micah + china clay (a by product of the china clay mining) and another mine's raw clay (Remfry), we mixed 3 main bodies to experiment with. 

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Learning about the composition of clays, how that can be flexed and altered for different goals, how plasticity and 'shortness' are dealt with (a common problem with wild clays that I'd already run into), was invaluable.

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The glaze testing set my brain on fire in the best of ways. Burning dried gorse we foraged from the Brickfield site, crushing and grinding decomposed granite (did you know granite essentially rots!?), seiving and mixing it with the quartz sand that was what made up most of the slag heaps around the site so create deep, rich, complex glaze results... I was perpetually gobsmacked. 

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Key findings:

• glaze is incredibly easy and basic to make

• extensive and clear note taking is ESSENTIAL

• wood firing will always be the best way to get the most out of a glaze like this, but not the only way

• wood firings can be very efficient and way more chill than expected

• community is a major part of wood firing

• experimentation is joy, expectations are a trap

• working with your hands alongside other makers is soul nourishing

• making a wood fired kiln is within the realms of possibility... 

• I want to do so much more of this

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