Press photo/Jake Browning - Doug Hubbs, an instructor at the Cowee Pottery School, works on putting together the school’s wood kiln on weekends.
Members of the Cowee Pottery School are all fired up about a new wood kiln that they’ll get to start baking in later this year.
The wood kiln is a long-anticipated project made possible by financial assistance from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina. The organization’s $5,000 grant has mostly gone towards infrastructure around the kiln to make sure it stays warm and dry while in use, but volunteers have gotten lots of work done on the kiln itself and donated supplies have been piling up. Pottery school president Charlotte Weingartner says that generosity in the community goes a long way towards helping the program meet its goals.
“The good people at the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina have been very generous to us,” Weingartner said. “They helped us with our gas kiln and electric kilns and now they’re helping us with this one too.”
The school has several kilns already, but a wood-burning kiln is a very different beast from the electric and gas powered devices they’re used to. The wood kiln will hold a fire for an entire night to “candle” the structure before being loaded with up to 100 average-sized pots and hardening them with intense heat. There’s a long-lived tradition of baking pottery with a real fire and potters swear by the effect it has on pots.
“We’ll get a reduction in the amount of oxygen,” said Doug Hubbs, an instructor with the school who’s been working on the kiln every weekend for several months. “It’ll bring all of the oxides out of the clay and the glaze because they’ll be looking for the flame. I consider it a much richer color.”
The last year has been trying for the pottery school, just like it has been for every program that calls Cowee School home. While the school waived rental fees for tenants who haven’t been able to hold their programs, they still didn’t get to hold regular classes for several months and had to cancel last year’s pottery festival. However, small classes did resume in November and the wood kiln represents an opportunity to rekindle interest in the program.
“Each method of firing pottery presents its own advantages and results,” said Hank Shuler, a member of the board of directors at Cowee School. “Our mission at the school is to introduce students to many of the menu items available to the potter in terms of building, altering, glazing and firing. This results in creating a community school of pottery available to very few small communities.”
Whenever activity levels at Cowee School return to normal, the potters hope that returning students will be quick to warm up to the new options available to them.
“Right now, it’s still pretty limited, but we’re hoping we can get back on track soon,” Weingartner said.
For more information on the Cowee Pottery School, call them at 828- 371-8070, email them at contact@coweepotteryschool.org or go online to www.coweepotteryschool.org.