Ceramic Review: Masterclass with Daphne Carnegy

So I'm Daphne Carnegie and I'm a Majolica potter and I've been potting professionally since 1980, so it's quite a long time, but I came to pottery via a rather circuitous route in that I did a degree in French at Nottingham and then worked in publishing for a bit and while I was working in publishing my boss, Mary Flint, she was doing a pottery evening class and she said it's great you know you should come along and so I went along and very quickly got hooked. Anyway some years later I got a job in France, I moved to France. While I was in France, this is down in Aix-en-Provence, I met a potter who needed some help so I used to go along and help her load the kiln and watch her and fire some things and then everywhere I went in France, when we went on trips, I would always look out the potteries and in the Ardèche there was a pottery called Salavas and there was a potter there called Gilles. He said if you're interested in pottery you should go to this potter in Burgundy called Jean-Paul Betton because every year he takes on a stagiaire like an apprentice and it's in this tiny little village in the Maconais and very beautiful and so on. So that's exactly what I did and I ended up staying a year in this little village watching Jean-Paul throw. I learned to throw almost uniquely through watching him. He never once watched me throw but I learned through watching him and I could throw in my spare time. But I learned so much about kiln packing and workshop practice and it was the most amazing time and after that, after that year, I did a sort of mini tour de France working in various potteries as a thrower. So I felt quite pleased that I got to that stage and then I felt the need to have more of an art training because I'd learned a lot of the practicalities. So I'd heard about harrow and how famous harrow was for particularly for throwing and for pottery in general. So I came back to England and I got onto the harrow course and that was really you know, that really convinced me that I was that was what I wanted to do. So during my time in France I fell in love with European earthenware techniques, notably slipware and tin glazed earthenware known in France as faience, in Italy as maiolica. But these are classic earthenware techniques and I love the freshness of earthenware. Tin glazed earthenware is fraught with potential problems because you're painting directly on the unfired surface of the glaze. So the process basically is that you make the pieces, you throw the pieces, add handles, whatever then the pieces are biscuit fired and then they are waxed, the feet are waxed and so on and then dipped in this quite thick white glaze. If the glaze is too thin it looks very mean and a lot of the body shows through, although that's another look which you know some people might like. If it's too thick it tends to crawl so it's because it's a very viscous glaze so it's not mobile so it's very susceptible to pinholing and crawling. The oxides or underglaze colours or mixtures of both are applied directly onto the raw glaze. So in a way it's a bit like painting on blotting paper. So you can't hang about, you have to get a flow with the brush. The more you hang about, the thicker the colour gets and again that can produce blistering and other sorts of problems. So when you're using oxides in particular, that's things like cobalt oxide, copper oxide, manganese dioxide, the natural oxides, it's very difficult to know what your, exactly the thickness or the colour of what you're painting because the colour value changes so completely with the firing. So cobalt which looks black or grey when you paint it on will come out bright blue. Copper is the same, it will go black and then fire green. Manganese will look black, they all look black, most of them look black and will fire to a soft purple. But the thickness again is crucial, the thickness of the oxide. So that really is trial and error and just get familiarising yourself with the qualities of the oxides. So at the moment I'm using a mixture of blue, cobalt blue and a black stain to which I add quite a lot of clear glaze because again the black can be quite refractory so the clear glaze just helps it blend in better. So then the pieces go back into the kiln for the glaze firing which is, I fire to, on the pyrometer it's about 1080 but in actual fact if you're using cones it's equivalent to about 1120. Then it's a total surprise opening the kiln, it's always a surprise. However well you know things, you're never quite sure how thick or intense the colours are going to be. William Newland who was a great potter in the 50s, he once likened earthenware to Mozart and stoneware to Beethoven. So I liked the liveliness and the freshness of the earthenware.