Deliberate kiln explosions, trenches and fire sculptures
Kiln firing as a ceremony
Thank you for your patience as I strayed from my usual schedule. The last few weeks have been very challenging and have culminated in the loss of my beloved 14,5 year old dog. I did not have the heart to draft and edit this article, which believe it or not, has been in progress for a while. Thank you so much for being here and for reading. If you can, becoming a paid supporter will help me continue on this journey.
Also, I don’t usually plug my own work on here, but my latest collection (a small update to my current cosmic and lava inspired work Moonscape), Cosmic Shells, is available.
As a ceramic artist who also happens to run a community studio, opening the kiln to explosions is pretty much the worst case scenario. The force of an explosion in a bisque fire will take out multiple pieces. Although it has only happened to me once, opening the kiln after a bisque remains a little bit frightening.
For some of our ancestors living 30,000 years ago, however, having pieces explode in the kiln was likely a ceremony in itself. In the 1920s, archeologists found thousands of stone-age ceramic artefacts and broken shards in Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia. These findings are the oldest ceramic artefacts ever found, dated 14,000 years before the earliest functional pots1. Among the most famous discovery was the 11-cm high Dolni Vestonice Venus (depicted below).
Besides the Venus and other ceramic figurines, around 10,000 fragments were found. The fact that these figurines were found in pieces caused a variety of questions: were they simply casualties of the kiln? Were the people living in that area bad at doing pottery?
In 1989, a paper published in Science aimed at demonstrating that these fragments had been subject of deliberate explosions2. The nature of the cracks indicated that these were the result of thermal shock during firing3, so in order understand whether the explosions may have been intentional, the authors of the study ran a variety of tests. They ran chemical analysis on samples to determine the clay body: a local loess, a clay-poor sediment with high porosity and low thermal expansion4. Thermal analysis was then conducted to establish the temperature ranges to which these figurines had been fired, which also involved firing replicas made of the same material at various temperatures and then examining them under the microscope to observe glass formation. They found that the clay could tolerate firing and thermal shock very well. Given the amount of fragments found throughout the region and the fact that they coexisted alongside intact artefacts, it would seem plausible that these figurines were deliberately placed in the kiln to explode, probably as a ritual5.
Our Stone Age ancestors were not finding beauty in broken things, rather saw the breaking itself as the ceremony. We don’t exactly know what the ceremony was for, but the explosion of animal figurines may have fulfilled a magical purpose, perhaps in an attempt to exert control over the animals that they were typically hunting6.
The act of firing here is seen as a performance, much like a religious ritual. Were people gathered around the kiln7 at safe distances to hear the explosions? Were there additional ceremonies that accompanied the firing? We can imagine what it would have been like to remove these pieces from the kilns: was did success look like?
Kiln firings are processes that bring about permanence, irreversible chemical and physical transformations of the clay. In a way, the process of firing is a way to immortalise the here and now.
Trenchées
In 2013, the Association Le Vent des Forêts invited Dutch artist Alexandra Engelfriet to create a work of art in the sculpture park in Lorraine, France. The area is close to Verdun, the theatre for the longest battle of the First World War. Inside the 10-meter section of a 50-meter long trench, Engelfriet used her body to sculpt 20 tons of clay. The entire mesmerising process and results were captured on film.
After the sculpting was completed, a kiln was built all around the section of the trench. The wood firing lasted around a week, in a process that required constant supervision and attention. After the firing, the clay took on a variety of colours: from reds to greys and greens.
The firing of the trench can be seen as the ritual of immortalisation of the space and a ritual in itself: since the artwork was meant to be visited after the performance of its creation, it was necessary to render it impervious to the elements. The fresh clay would have lost shape and gone back to mud if exposed to the rain. However, even fired, the pieces will be shaped by the air and wind over time. The Parc Vents des Forêts, an open air contemporary art museum, features over 130 works of art that can be seen while walking its 45km of trails. Since 1997, over 200 have been created but not all of them have survived until now8.
Trenchée remains in the open air, so one can argue that the process of its firing was as much a performance as the sculpting, and not merely a means to an end.
Nina Hole’s fire sculptures: The ultimate kiln firing performance
Nina Hole was a Danish artist who pushed the boundaries of materials and firing as a spectacle. From 1994 until a year before her death in 2016, Nina created her famous fire sculptures all over the world.
A typical fire sculpture consists of a large construction, often a house (as the house represented the notion of self and ego according to Nina)9, which was painstakingly built by hand with the help of local volunteers and then fired in situ.
The firing process was a real spectacle: once finished, the sculpture was wrapped in a refractory fibre blanket, a material that had previously only been used by the space industry. The firing took about a week, starting with the kindling of the fire underneath the sculpture to ensure the kiln reached temperature.
Once the firing reached a temperature of around 1200C, just before sunrise, Hole and volunteers pulled away the fabric blanket10. The structure is glowing red and illuminated by the flame. Spectators are given a bucket of sawdust to throw at the glowing sculpture. As the sawdust reaches the house, flames erupted. (Nina said that this is when the house was breathing11.)
The video below shows the entire process, from making to firing, of Hole’s last fire sculpture, which was built and fired in 2015 at the Sculpture Park at the International Ceramics Center Guldagergaard in Denmark, which Nina co-founded.
There are multiple videos of Nina’s firing performances all over the world. I recommend you watch one. There is no doubt that the firing spectacle is a ritual in itself. It is a communal and participatory process, far from our kiln rooms where pieces reach temperature unobserved. There is awe and excitement in the process. Watching a large sculpture go up in flames and re-merge forever altered is deeply moving and introspective. It brings us closer to our deeply rooted fascination with fire, maybe closer to understanding what our ancestors in Dolni Vestonice were feeling as the figurines exploded in the kiln, allowing us to participate in a process, the making of a monument and the immortalisation of matter.
Fire has a mystical aspect to it and we, as people, have always been fascinated by it. I will leave you with Gaston Bachelard’s reflection on fire.
Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. …
It is a pleasure for the good child sitting prudently by the hearth; yet it punishes any disobedience when the child wishes to play too close to its flames. It is well-being and it is respect. It is a tutelary and a terrible divinity, both good and bad. It can contradict itself; thus it is one of the principles of universal explanation12.
PAMELA B. VANDIVER, OLGA SOFFER, BOHUSLAV KLIMA, AND JIRl SVOBODA, The Origins of Ceramic Technology at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia, 24 November 1989, Science, Volume 246, p. 1002
Ibid
ibid, p.1007
ibid
ibid
Chris Golden, The History of Magic, Penguin Books, p.36
A few kiln structures were found in Dolni Vestonice in the 1950s and 1970s. They were circular structures and constructed with loess. See PAMELA B. VANDIVER, OLGA SOFFER, BOHUSLAV KLIMA, AND JIRl SVOBODA, p.1005-1007
See the website of the park, and filter for artworks that are no longer visible: https://ventdesforets.com/oeuvres/
Nina Hole, Official Website, From the video interview she released along her last fire sculpture in Denmark, Accessed November 2nd 2024, http://www.ninahole.com/fire/Guldagergaard/Nine%20Hole%20-%20Fire%20Sculpture%20SD.mp4
Brigitte Christens, “I worked with pioneer ceramist Nina Hole back in the days”, https://www.birgittechristens.dk/single-post/2016/05/25/i-worked-with-pioneer-ceramist-nina-hole-who-died-in-2016-1, Accessed November 2nd 2024
Nina Hole, Official Website, Ibid
GASTON BACHELARD, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964, p.7
Really interesting, thanks
I am bookmarking this so I can watch the videos later. I love this, the intentional explosion. Comes just at the right time: I’m about to open a kiln 😬