Steve Irvine on mon 9 may 05
I got some interesting results out of this weekend's firing with a glaze made up of just beach
pebbles from nearby Georgian Bay and a local iron rich shale.
The beach pebbles are mostly made up of dolostone, but also with a fraction of granite, quartz
and even a few fossils. The shale is a red, clayey material known to geologists as the Queenston
Formation, a feature that runs diagonally across southern Ontario from Niagara Falls to the Bruce
Peninsula where I live. I dig the shale just down the road from my home and rough sieve it, the
pebbles are pulverized in a ball mill. The ratio in the glaze is pebbles 40 percent and shale 60
percent. Here are two examples:
The first is a handbuilt tea bowl fired to cone 10 reduction:
http://www.steveirvine.com/clayart/peb_sha01.jpg
The second is a thrown tea bowl that was fired on its side, inside the firebox to about cone 12:
http://www.steveirvine.com/clayart/peb_sha02.jpg
Both the dolostone parent rock and the shale were laid down in our region about 440 million years
ago when this area was covered by a shallow tropical sea.
Steve Irvine
http://www.steveirvine.com
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