Inside a Kiama Ceramic Studio with Frances Smith

The light in a Kiama ceramic studio changes by the hour. It comes off the water first thing, flat and white, and by the middle of the afternoon it has gone warm enough that you stop trusting your own eyes about glaze colour. Frances Smith has worked in that light for years. This is what a working day looks like from the inside.

The first hour in the Kiama ceramic studio

Clay does not like being rushed. The first job most mornings is wedging, which is the kneading that pushes air out of a lump of clay and lines up the particles so it will not tear on the wheel. It is dull and it is not optional. A pocket of trapped air will survive the throwing, survive the drying, and then burst in the kiln and take the piece with it.

After that comes the wheel. A vase form is thrown in one sitting because the clay stiffens as it loses water, and a shape left half finished overnight will never quite join up. The pieces that come off the wheel are soft enough to dent with a thumb, so they go onto boards and get covered loosely while the walls firm up.

Why the work waits

Most of the time in the studio is waiting. A thrown vase needs a day or two before it is leather hard, which is the stage where it holds its shape but still takes a tool. That is when the foot gets trimmed and any carving or beadwork is added. Then it waits again, uncovered this time, until it is bone dry and pale and surprisingly fragile.

Only then does it go into the kiln for the first firing. The bisque firing takes the clay up to around a thousand degrees and turns it into something that will not dissolve in water. It is still porous at that point, which is exactly what you want, because a porous pot drinks up glaze evenly.

Glaze, and the part nobody can photograph

Glazing is where a piece is won or lost. The raw glaze goes on looking chalky and dull and almost always the wrong colour. A blue that fires to deep cobalt can go on looking like grey mud. You are working from notes and memory and a shelf of test tiles, and you do not find out whether you were right until the kiln has cooled two days later. Every Kiama ceramic studio shelf ends up carrying hundreds of those small tiles, because they are the only honest record of what a glaze actually does.

The Blue Gum vase in the photograph above is a good example. The beads are added by hand before the glaze firing, each one placed while the clay is still soft enough to take them. If the beads dry at a different rate to the body of the vase, they crack away. Getting a full set to survive is a matter of care rather than luck, but it never stops feeling like luck.

The third firing

Anything with gold on it goes back in a third time. Gold lustre fires much lower than the glaze underneath, around seven hundred and fifty degrees, and it goes on as a thin brown liquid that smells strongly and looks like nothing at all. It comes out as bright metal. There is no way to test it in advance and no way to fix it afterwards. If a line is wobbly, it is wobbly for good.

This is the reason a single vessel can take three weeks of calendar time while holding only a few hours of actual work. The kiln sets the pace and the kiln does not negotiate.

What the Kiama ceramic studio makes

The work divides into a few families. There are the Australiana pieces, which take gum leaves, flannel flowers and hibiscus as their starting point. There are the Bush Tucker vessels, built around quandong and wattle and chocolate lily. There are lamps, which have to be functional as well as good looking, and there are the Zany Characters, which are exactly as serious as their name suggests.

You can see the current range on the Frances Smith profile, and there is more Australian ceramic work from other makers over on the work we have listed. If you want to understand the wider craft, the Australian Ceramics Association keeps a good directory of makers and events around the country.

What visitors usually ask

Two questions come up almost every time somebody visits a Kiama ceramic studio. The first is how long a piece takes, and the honest answer is that the making is quick and the waiting is long. The second is whether the maker minds when something breaks in the kiln. The answer to that one is that you mind very much for about an hour, and then you sweep it up and throw another one, because that is the job.