Inside the anagama

The first thing I recall is the sense of overtired elation. Like at the end of a wedding. Your feet are aching, your voice is hoarse and your limbs are limp but deep in your belly you're satiated with joy and life and connection.

A wood kiln asks for attention with no exceptions. Every pot carries decisions made days, weeks, and sometimes months earlier and being a part of the decision making crew this time had a new sense of responsibility and pressure and a massive sense of privilege. Carrying the work of 50 artists through this experience is tender and it's nerve wracking.

The kiln before the first stoke, quiet and laden.

You cannot rush mother

The days before a firing always have a rhythm; practical but charged. There's so much anticipation but also so much tension and pressure. We packed bisque pots into boxes and wrapped edges; bowls nestled into bowls, cups tucked into gaps, taller forms get their own box. We checked feet, cleaned bases, signed and wadded and prepared...

This one will go near the flame.

This one needs a quieter place.

This one can take the heat.

The truth is, no one fully knows what's going to happen inside Mother, the Kigbeare anagama. Experience helps; it teaches patterns but it also teaches humility, because the kiln has a longer memory than any of us and every firing crew has a new and dynamic personality. We shape the firing through our actions, our decisions and our lapses. Our character is imbued into the character of the firing and the pots reflect this forever.

There are moments in the preparation that always remind me, maybe a bit theatrically, of ancient ritual. When there's 5 people gathered around a bucket rolling tiny balls of wadding, our hands caked and cracked, telling stories and laughing. It feels ancient and wonderful. When we're all taking a sip of tea, admiring the work of a day and quietly imagining what's coming... There is care and connection in the unremarkable moments.

Then comes the planning. In a wood firing, shelter and exposure are always in conversation. A pot cannot be everywhere. It cannot receive everything all at once. It must be placed and that placement becomes part of the work. That placement is everything to that one pot and also everything to the thousands of pots around it. Every gap that's filled, every flame diverted or invited shapes the entire kiln's load and so our teamwork and our community is reflected in our pieces working together inside the belly of the beast.

The loading is slow.

You hold a pot, turn it in your hands, and imagine a future version of it. The side tilted towards the fire might darken, a shoulder might gather ash, a rim might flash warm where the flame passes through a narrow gap, a shell might leave it's ridges as a kiss and the neighbouring pot might flash it's own colour against the belly of yours. Pots that you've never seen before become yours as you place them, thinking of their best possible outcome and sending tiny prayers for each one to achieve it.

There is a particular silence when a kiln is being loaded well. People still talk, don't get me wrong. We ask for the next shelf, pass cones, shift props, check heights, and look again and again and again for the gap that's just right.

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I remember the feel of the kiln bricks under my hands. Cooler than they would be later, rough and slightly powdery. I remember crouching low to pass things forward, then stepping back and realising how quickly the inside was changing. This is the part that can look like guesswork from the outside, but inside it feels more like listening.

a measure of time

Once the door is closed, the relationship changes; the work is still there, but it is out of reach and from that point on, the making happens through heat and flame and time.

You learn new things every firing and every stoke seems reminiscent but new. The fire does not respond well to panic or impatience. Mother needs rhythmn and time to respond to your choices. Too much wood at the wrong time can smother her whereas too little can lose momentum. Too much air and you change the glazes, too little and she chokes. The sound changes when the kiln is hungry, happy, lazy... The colour changes, the smoke changes, the smell changes... there's constant conversation with the kiln and we are towed along in her inevitable force. It can definitely feel relentless and like we're not really in control. We watched the cones and read the surfaces we could see only as hints through spy holes and flame and followed the kiln's lead.

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The body records this kind of work and you feel it long after the end of the process. Heat on the face, ash in your hair, smoke in your nose and dirt under your nails. Your eyes get gritty and your feet feel heavy by the end of the firing. There's a strange wakefulness during your shift, no matter the time of day and a deep weariness when you get to pass your responsibilties to the next crew.

Firing time is not normal time. It's measured in wood, mugs of tea, the scrape of boots, the sound of the kiln's hunger, and the shared recognition that everyone is serving this beautiful beast. Hours disappear quickly and by day five, every hour is significant and different and demanding.

A kiln can make a group of people very honest. It shows who watches carefully, who rushes, who steadies the room, and who knows when to do less and more.

That honesty is one of the reasons I keep returning to this way of firing. Studio work can be private and unaccountable. Wood-kiln work is communal. Even when the pots are deeply personal, the firing belongs to everyone who stood near it, fed it, watched it, and kept it moving.

I love seeing when your shyest participants lean into taking charge of a shift. When less experienced potters ask the right questions. When more experienced potters gently lead people to the answers or admit they don't know. I love seeing how the process changes people, uncovers them and blasts through any social boundaries until we're all just labourers under Mother's demands. It's equalising, humbling and deeply gratifying.

The people are the process

I have been thinking a lot about the community of wood firings. How every pot is handled by everyone on the way in, how everyone contributes their sweat and their effort and their hearts throughout the firing and on the way out, everyone falls in love with hundreds of pieces, be they their own or not.

The endless nurture of your fellow stokers, as you check if they've drunk enough water, as you ask if they need a cuppa, the quiet preparation of wood for their next stoke, the gentle reminders to glove-up. Everything is tender and single-mindedly focused on this one task that births, what turned out to be, nearly 2,000 pots.

This is where pottery, ceramics, anagama firing, and lived studio practice all meet for me. The object is made by hand, then remade by conditions that cannot be fully repeated and are fundamentally and integrally shaped by people. My pots are theirs in many ways and as each of our pieces trickles out into the world we can all take pride in their results and so much joy in their heritage.

I have a habit of romanticising it. A wood-firing can be hard on pots. It can be hard on people too. There is labour in the romance and the ritual, there are losses too: cracked pieces, dry surfaces, overfired or underfired, underwhelming surprises, and the dull little ache of wanting something to have gone differently. I lost a lot of pots to a driving incident the day after we opened the kiln. They're irreplaceable and unrecreateable. There's an emotional and financial toll there, but in the end, the experience and the remaining pots becomes more valuable for the losses. To me anyway.

I keep replaying certain moments:

• The first glimpses of flame out of the top spy holes.

• The ember bed growing to mountainous size, forcing us to dive into it and shift it.

• The 2am shift, watching the sun rise and hearing the owls

• The tired laughter that arrived at odd hours.

• The feeling of knowing the pots were changing beyond sight.

• Seeing the first cones go down.

• the 1am finish where we all, delerious and elated, collapsed on the floor and shared a beer.

She hoards her heat

There is a beautiful kind of restraint in waiting for the reveal. The kiln cools on its own terms, this year we gave her three weeks and still she was hoarding her heat, softly baking our pieces with the residual warmth. The pots sit inside with everything that happened to them, waiting patiently for us to come and claim them. No amount of wanting can hurry that stage, and boy is the wanting unbearable.

There is always pressure to move quickly from process to result, particularly now my income is derived from this work. The relentless train of making the work, fiing the work, photographing the work, listing the work, selling the work. With wood firing I find myself very separate from this train. The work deserves a little space before it becomes an image on a screen and I find I need time to sit with them over a few weeks, in various lights and spaces.

The finished surfaces carry more than colour. They carry the story of the firing and the hands of everyone involed. They carry the memory of the firing crew and all of the decisions made months earlier at the wheel and the decisions made in seconds at the kiln.

So for now, I am holding the reveal back a little. Not to be coy, but to give the work the kind of attention that made it possible in the first place. The shop drop is coming, and the pots will have their public moment soon. When they do, I want each piece to arrive with some of this story still around it.

What I am carrying forward

This firing reminded me that making is not linear, is not just in the moment and is not a closed circle. I have made pots this time around that I threw and sat aside in seconds, and pieces I laboured on for months that I had no real plan for. I have pieces in my head ready for next year's anagama and don't know what else I will find along the way to reshape those plans. I am relieved in a way that I feel this - I often feel pressure to have a defined style and to know what I need to make every time I open my studio door but recently that's softening. Wood firing helps this.

I am carrying forward the memory of the crew as much as the memory of the pots. The steadiness. The practical kindness. The way people made room for each other around heat, tools, stacks of wood, and tiredness. The hugs, the raucus cackles, the whispered assurances and the gentle leans against one another as we hit our limit of fatigue. A kiln firing can make visible the best parts of a studio community and I always feel a moment of grief when we all head back to our lives afterwards.

The fire has already had its say. The pots are waiting to be seen.