Raku

Sponsored by Creative West End

Photo by author

At 12 noon (19th December) Rae Tribbick and Andrew Morris set up a Raku furnace on the beach near the Battery and brought out the pots we’d created at the West End Christmas Market a couple of weeks earlier. The pots had been biscuit fired (baked) and glazed ready for Raku firing. A little while later folks turned up to watch their pots being fired and see the results.

This was a project sponsored by Creative West End to coincide with the Christmas market and be delivered by Rae and Andrew (Ram Ceramics).

One of the glazes contains copper oxide. Copper oxide is the copper equivalent of rust and you will know that when copper is exposed to the elements it turns green just as iron turns red. This process is known as oxidation and the opposite effect (converting the oxide to metal) is known as reduction (taking the oxygen out).

In Raku the pot is fired to a high temperature and then placed in a container with a combustible material like sawdust. As the sawdust burns it takes the oxygen out of the glaze and reduces the copper oxide leaving the glaze copper coloured. The process is unpredictable so it’s exciting to see how the glazing turns out. It’s important that the container is sealed so that the oxygen in the glaze is what’s burning the sawdust. This was achieved using small upturned buckets with beach sand…