Playing with fire is not necessarily a symptom of pyromania. Kids like to roast chestnuts or marshmallows on small barbecue fires to discover the art of cooking ; teenagers gather around bonfires on warm summer nights to celebrate their youth ; now it is a shiny new toy which fires clay at 1300°C in few hours. But every time the pleasure comes from controlling the fire, making it useful to lead it to give what it’s expected to give with no damages around.
Firing with wood becomes a confrontation to the final element that will have the last word on what one intended to do when putting one’s hands on the clay in the first place. There’s the heat, of course, and the tiredness, but also the smells, the noises, the moments of meditation and intimacy.
At last after a three days drop in temperature everything is revealed : the prints on the stoneware brought out by the porcelain slip, the blazing effect of a hint of kaolin, the collapse of a shape too audacious for the clay’s resistance, the golden bronze of coupled copper and manganese, a small pot of salt which has slightly bent and got stuck to a jar, a dark sign of reduction, a progress from dull to shiny caused by the salt, some melted ash…the very genesis of the piece of art is here, engraved forever.
