Jon Pettyjohn on fri 21 feb 97
Hi
since this discussion about growing organic beasties
in clay came up, I thought I'd tell you about some unusual
clay i bought some years ago.
I once found a source for kaolin here in Manila at a
tile factory owned by a Chinese family. It was an excellent
plastic kaolin and it came pretty much straight out of the
ground without any major processing. Although it was a little
off-white it was the main ingredient in a translucent porcelain
I was mixing. The owner of the factory said he imported it from
China and when I asked where, he told me (you can believe this or
not) the place was called Shao Lin, which as all fans of Kung Fu
should know means "White Mountain."
Now the interesting thing about the clay other than it's
plasticity and translucency was that after it had aged a few
months (I was in the habit of putting a bottle of San Miguel
beer into my clay batches) it would change color after standing
in the open air. The freshly thrown pots would look white but
after a few hours they began to turn sort of bluish grey on the
outside surfaces and the color would penetrate slowly towards the
center so that when I trimmed my pots I noticed that I could
judge the thickness very accurately by observing the color change
as I cut deeper. I knew when I was halfway through the wall when
I found the lightest color and the clay started to darken as I cut
deeper.I was able to make some very thin very even bowls with this
clay.
Now the sad thing is I was only able to get about 2 tons of this
clay before the owner changed sources. I was never able to buy it
or find it's source again. I have kept a bucket full of it though,
in the hope that I might someday get a chance to have the color
change bacteria cultured so that I could add it to other
clay bodies. I have been told by scientific types that culturing
might be an expensive process.
Now please don't laugh but I'm seriously wondering if anybody thinks
it's worth the effort to develop a "depth indicating" clay that
could solve the age old problem of "when do I stop?" when trimming.
Do you think there might be Nobel Prize in this?
Jon Pettyjohn Manila jon@mozcom.com
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