View Larger Image Taking perhaps 200 times as long to make a single pot than a thrower means that Gabriele Koch's work is restricted in number.

April 1, 2007

A Ceramic Artist’s Slow, Smoky Road to Success

by Ceramic Arts Daily | Read Comments (4)

Imagine your ceramic art being a favorite of a well-known international collector.  That’s the case for German-born potter Gabriele Koch.

Sir David Attenborough, a British television pioneer and well-known naturalist, is an enthusiastic collector. His wide-ranging ceramic art collection focuses more on artifact than on fine art. It includes things made for the improvement of the quality of life in primitive cultures as well as modern civilization. 

Attenborough’s collection is based on the idea that a tool or a pot can be both useful and beautiful. But sculptural quality is what Attenborough seeks most, and that defines his clay art collection.

Among modern potters in Attenborough’s collection is Koch, whose work the broadcaster  has admired and collected for many years. He even wrote the introduction to the monograph on Koch’s work.

What makes her work so appealing? It’s the process and perfectionism she uses to create her burnished and smoke-fired ceramic art.

There are some who say that the burnish/smoke fire technique is limited, and that to restrict oneself to it is to be confined. But Koch finds immense opportunities for experimentation and refinement within the self-imposed restrictions of this method.

Taking perhaps 200 times as long to make a single pot than a thrower means that her work is restricted in number. She works very hard, but makes few pots. She wants to be judged by the results; nothing that fails to match up to her standards is allowed to reach the marketplace.

“I am interested in the vessel as an abstract sculptural object. I am concentrating on simple essential forms, which sometimes emphasize the relationship between internal and external space; of movement or stillness within the form.”

In a few words, Koch is describing ceramic sculpture at its best, where the undeniably attractive and compelling concept of the vessel is refined and developed to please the eye. The vessels she makes are in good company. They are at home alongside Attic vessels, pre-Columbian Pueblo pots, the more humble domestic ware of India or North Africa, and of course other fine modern ceramics.

And so it is with Koch. She explains, “I am not trying to make just any new form: this would be like inventing something for the sake of invention, trying to be clever. My interest lies in organic development, where one form contains the seed for the next one, where form is rooted in its own family tree.”

She works alone in a clean, white studio in north London, sometimes building several pots at once, or having various pots at various stages. Slow drying is an essential requirement for forms that are to be slipped and burnished, and each one has to be caught and carried forward at precisely the right time. Thus, in the interests of efficiency and production, perhaps four or five forms are in process at once.

Koch occasionally gives lectures and demonstrations. In her lectures she pays homage to sources of her inspiration--Claudi Casanovas, Hans Coper, Peter Voulkos and Paul Soldner--but more significantly to the Catalan artist Antoni Tapies and the dry, hot Spanish landscapes that first drew her to work in the field of earth and fire.

The Flexibility of Smoke Firing

After the slow first firing in a gas kiln to 1740°F (950°C) is completed, ceramic artist Gabriele Koch places the pot, vertically or at an angle, in a garbage bin kiln or any sort of metal container--sometimes an old oil drum.

For really large ceramic pots, she may build a special kiln from firebricks joined with sticky clay, but the kiln is just a container for the heat. What is important is how she packs the pots inside and out with a mixture of different kinds of sawdust. It is her choice of sawdust and the density of the packing--how hard she presses the sawdust against the pot’s surface---that gives her control of the patterning, and she chooses this to suit each pot.

The result does not always please her, in which case the patterning can be fired away in a standard gas kiln to a temperature of 1470°F (800°C) and smoke fired again in a new batch of sawdust. So, like another “take” on film or a piece of bronze casting where the patination needs to be stripped off chemically and done again, she can work on her perfect form until it has a perfect marriage with its smoky, carbonized surface.