Low-fire ceramics and wood-fired kilns
Jeps, that sums up my interest when it comes to ceramics:
More specifically wood firing, DIY homemade & entry kilns, historic ceramics & archeology, craft and culture, raw materials, low-fired glazes, and earthenware clay.
This website started as my personal notes: When I gathered my know-how on my C: drive, it just didn’t end up in an informative and elegant way. Since I’m also interested in WordPress, always take a lot of pictures, and believe in sharing know-how, it all ended up here as this webpage.
And that’s my only ambition as far as this webpage is concerned. I hope you like it, and if you do, please make a link back to my webpage.
Picture of my pottery studio. I know! It’s quite picturesque, almost like a Hobbit house. In old papers, it’s referred to as “Tussebu”. “Tusser” in Norwegian folklore is some kind of goblin, and “bu” means house, so here they live, or so the name says. Well not really a goblin, I don’t think there exists a good English translation for Norwegian underground creatures like Tusser.
Tusser was considered real in Norway just a few generations ago, and you should handle nature with care not to upset them. They were active in the twilight hour, and though they were not directly evil, they could make a lot of trouble*
Folklore away; Tussebu was built sometime before 1880, in Valdres, Norway. The building’s original purpose is no longer known, but since I found good, local clay just a few meters away, making pottery here just makes perfect sense.
Wood Fire Ceramic .com
About me: I do have a master of arts in ceramics, but left the career 20 years ago. I guess it makes me too well-educated to be an amateur, and too un-established to be a professional. Not what I once dreamt of I admit. But there are other ways to be engaged in the craft too, at least that’s what I try to convince myself. With a steady income elsewhere, I have the freedom to immerse myself in any part of the field that I like, and skip all the things I just don’t; like serial production, exhibitions, and constant money concerns.
What I do like is reading books, figuring out & testing things, I like trial and error, and redoing things over and over til I get it right. I like the craft and the feel of it, I like wet terracotta, and practical material know-how.
Vemund, Norway 2024. hello@woodfireceramics.com
I do hang around this wood-firing Facebook forum:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/251793538306087
* A fun fact about Nisser and Tusser: If you are at home putting away a tool or whatever. And you know you put it on the table, right? But five minutes later when you need it again, it’s not there! So you search everywhere but you just can’t find your tool. That’s strange, right? But you got other things to do, maybe time for making dinner or you need to go for a walk or whatever. When you return, the tool is back on the table, just where you put it!
Now that’s the work of Skrømt.
Incredible as it sounds today; my great-great-grandmother Antonette Bye could inherit an old farm, but refused to move since Skrømt was living there. This was before electricity was common; living in a small forest farm with only oil lamps in the dark Norwegian autumn could challenge the imagination of everyone I guess.
To believe in Skrømt was as common back then, as belief in UFOs is today. And that’s interesting in itself; how the “unnatural” adapts to our ever-changing culture and beliefs.