KENTON BAKER - BEVERLY FISHER WOODFIRING CYPRUS KILN

HOME

GALLERY

BIOGRAPHY

UPCOMING EVENTS

Please scroll down

The woodfiring kiln we designed and built on Cyprus was a very small updraft kiln. The kiln was to be used as a model for an older style kiln that was used on the island in making a certain type of pottery. The kiln is mainly used for test purposes and bi-communal efforts by artists from the north and south to come and work side by side in firing this kiln. The project was originated by Polly Tessler. As you can see from the pictures, there were few modern tools used during construction and for that matter, few modern anything was used. Clay was dug, mixed and used on the kiln as well as other found materials. We hope you find this little kiln interesting. It was finished in April 2006 and still needs to be covered with insulation, the hand made insulating castable mix we use on our kilns. We will update this as we get more pictures ready.

please click on any image to enlarge

We then added consecutive rows, staggering the brick and filling in the triangular spaces with clay castable mix.

The kiln is circular and all we had were straight bricks. So we started with the base by placing the bricks like this.

The first picture here shows the firebox base being started. Notice the high tech advances in form construction. Its all we had.

Slivers of clay were used to hold the arch and then a castable clay mix was used to make it solid as the second and third picture above here show. The clay was cleaned off and smoothed out (not shown here).

A bamboo support system was made and a mound of sand hand smoothed to create the curved floor. We curved the floor to take extra stress and weight rather than a level, straight floor.

As the three pictures on the right show, clay was placed over the sand. Holes were made with super duty plastic cups aged with red wine. These holes allow flame to pass through from the firebox into the chamber. The pottery was tumble stacked on this floor.

Another bamboo structure for the top dome.

All done except for the dome at the top. This was made out of clay castable material and exit flue holes put in with plugs to control the rate of draw. The pictures below shows part of the dome with the holes in it.

The loading door being started.

Lastly the almost complete kiln. What is still needed is the home made castable insulation layer applied and smoothed out. Then a coat of white slip for aesthetic reasons. You can see the firebox and loading door from this view.

This page is still under construction so more pictures will be added as we get them ready to upload.