Turning Literal Mud into Pottery | Wild Clay with Ben ep. 5
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- Опубліковано 30 чер 2024
- benshane.com (see my work and support me)
IG: @tinkerandthink (follow for more info)
In an effort to be transparent and comprehensive and balanced, this week I’d like to show you just how bad a wild clay can be. If you go out looking for clay, you stand a solid chance of finding a good one, like the one I shared last week. But you might also find a real dud, like this one.
Trying to throw a cup with this clay required some finesse-not my forte. My first attempt ripped through it completely. By working very gently and slowly, I coerced a little cup out of this muck. I trimmed it and bisque fired it, along with a test bar.
This is a soil with a high clay content. It isn’t anything like a vein of pure clay. Some clay was deposited by the river and the clay mixed with organic matter and sand and probably manure and whatever else was around. There’s enough clay in this mud to hold it together, but barely. At the end of this video, I’ll show you what this looks like after firing in the kiln.
What makes this clay so bad? Well, it isn’t the clay itself, but rather, all the other stuff that’s in this muck that isn’t clay.
We need to differentiate a seemingly pedantic but very important pair of terms here: clay versus clay body. Almost everybody says “clay” when they are referring to a “clay body.” I do it myself, often. Sometimes it is done with full knowledge of the difference and a preference for speaking casually-usually, however, it is done without realizing what is being said or left unsaid.
Clay is a mineral. Clay is microscopic platelets that hold water between them, so that when hydrated, they slide over one another. This is what makes wet clay plastic. One clay varies from the next in the size of platelet and the precise chemical formula.
The stuff we use in pottery is not pure clay. It is a mixture of this mineral called clay plus several others ingredients. This mixture is called a clay body. Whatever you buy at the ceramics supply store is a clay body.
We add things to clay for many reasons: so we can fire it to lower temperatures, so it shrinks less, so it is less porous. For example, a traditional porcelain contains only three ingredients: kaolin (a relatively pure clay mineral) plus silica plus feldspar. The feldspar helps everything melt at a lower temperature, the silica helps form a strong and non-porous matrix, and the kaolin makes the whole mixture workable. Clay absorbs water, and shrinks as it dries and is fired to hotter temperatures. These other ingredients typically don’t absorb water, and don’t contribute to the shrinkage of a clay body.
Okay, enough of that today. That was all to get around to what’s going on with this clay-which isn’t pure clay at all. The clay isn’t the problem, it’s all the other stuff in it.
Here’s the test bar I made of this muck to measure shrinkage. A normal clay body will shrink, from wet workable clay to bisque fired, by about 10 percent. This test bar shrank only 3% from wet to bisque fired. A normal clay body might have about 50% clay in the recipe.
The somewhat reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that my little mud sample here contains about a third of the clay content as a normal clay. That is, this muck is probably less than 20% clay, and more than 80% sand, organic matter, and bugs.
And yet. and yet. It is possible to make pottery with it. So, after all, I want you to see that whatever you go out and dig, you can have some fun and experiment with it.
00:00 - Last week's video
00:29 - First attempt
01:04 - Second attempt
01:29 - Clay vs. Clay Body
03:55 - Test Bar
04:12 - Bisque-fired Cup
04:46 - Complete Failure - Навчання та стиль
I appreciate seeing the failure. It's a huge part of making things that often is not shown. Especially with wild clay, I'm sure this experience is inevitable.
I'm experienced with painting and drawing, but a beginner to ceramics. With clay, it feels like flaws and mistakes are really immortalized in a way that's different from the media I'm used to. Very forgiving at first, but there are distinct points of no return. And the end product is a three-dimensional object that may be completely different from your original vision.
I love working with clay. It's just a very different artistic process.
I absolutely agree. Pottery is full of failure, but it's all an opportunity to learn. When making pots, I find that it's harder to fix a mistake than to avoid making one in the first place--but avoiding mistakes is really hard, too! So it can often feel like the flaws are immortalized, because if you have learned enough to fix the flaw, you probably wouldn't have made it in the first place. It's a cruel irony.
I’m curious, do you think you could save a dud clay like this one by manually increasing the clay ratio in the body? I’m thinking adding some kaolin or maybe with another wild clay that’s too plastic and cracks when drying. Or is it too much work/cost when you could go out and find better clay?
It's a great question. This particular clay is so bad, it isn't worth it. I want to try it as a glaze ingredient, though. Not very plastic clays are abundant, and I have mixed together a low plasticity clay with a wild bentonite, and it works great. In the end, it depends on what's nearby. If you have a crappy clay and a wild bentonite, and nothing in between, it could be worth it.
Deve ser relaxante trabalhar com argila. Se eu tivesse como, iria experimentar
i am experimenting with some clay from a dried river. it looks like creamy milk chocolate when wet, it has slightly worse plasticity but also seems stickier, is more prone to cracking & dries quicker than store bought clay. from workable to dry it has shrunk 10% & lost 25 % of its weight (am yet to bisque it). i am curious to know why it behaves the way it does. it seems perhaps a bit silty? i am trying to mix it with some paper (2:1) which has had promising results for the first stages of drying (& suits me bcos i hand build, suspect it would not be easy to throw)..
It's unusual to have a "sticky" clay that isn't plastic, and a clay that shrinks a lot but dries quickly. Typically, more plastic clays absorb more water, so they dry slowly and shrink a lot (hence a lot of cracking). 10% is a huge amount of shrinkage from wet to dry. You've described a sample that stumps me! How did you process it?
@@tinkerandthink all i did was wet process it, mixing it up in a big bucket of water, let it settle & pour off the liquid through a sieve into a cloth. i processed a stupid amount bcos i was overexcited & now have about 4 bags worth of the stuff 😅
@@tinkerandthink i might make some more test tiles to be sure i didnt make a mistake with the numbers bcos it seemed weird to me too. am curious to see how it bisques
@@tinkerandthink made a lil video of the clay in its various states.. pleased to say it biqued quite nicely ua-cam.com/video/iVQJ1lfJ-_k/v-deo.html
Separate clay soil into layers by shaking it up in a jar filled with water. The clay settles last (top layer)
That would help, but this sample contains so little clay it isn't worth it. I prefer to find a better clay (a lot of them exist).
I think they meant as perhaps a method to test the clay before going through processing, to save time and see if there's enough clay content in future samples to move forward with further workability testing 😊
dang!!...that was a flop buddy.