Stephen Robison

Wow its getting closer and I am certainly looking forward to a good time.  I have heard that it is and that Yuma is a great symposium.  I have only been to AZ once to present at a wood fire conference in Flagstaff.  I am privileged to be a part of The Great Yuma Symposium.  I was so excited about getting there I accidentally booked my plane ticket a day before it starts!

So they say the devil is in the details.  Dang, if I would have just checked the dates before booking. But since I don’t believe in the devil its cool, I will relax and enjoy Yuma.  I think the beauty in life is the intricacies and the details. They are often more hard to discern but for me the challenge of details are where much of both the ugliness of life and the beauty of life lie. To see the big picture details are needed.

So the images I am posting are details of my work and the collaborative work I do with my partner Kathleen Guss.

 

The work is primarily fired in atmospheric kilns such as wood fired or soda fire kilns and generally there is no glaze used except for liner glazes, but I do use a variety of metallic oxide slips to work with the surface. 

 

These details are from pieces that are all made from different clay bodies, but fired in a similar atmosphere. They have layers of ash and sodium that create crystals that are varied in their chemic make up due to the wood used and the metallic oxides inherent in each individual clay body.

 

Both the science and serendipity, or the control and lack of control of the process of wood and soda firing are focal points that continually hold my interest and offer somewhat unlimited areas of investigation into surface.

 

Some recent work is using laterite, which are soils that formed in hot and wet tropical areas and are very rich both iron and aluminum.  The reticulation of the surface creates a skin like tension and a surprise of some brilliant copper penny looking crystals are two areas of investigation. On some forms the metal from the laterite rises to the surface to form more drastic reticulation.

 --Stephen Robison  35th Yuma Symposium Presenter