Welcome to Wiley Hill Mudworks!
Welcome to Wiley Hill Mudworks online. Here you will find information about wood firing pottery, pictures of the process, a gallery of my work, and a link to buy my pots. All of my pottery is food safe as well as microwave and dishwasher safe. Please visit often as our stock is constantly changing and due to the process, no two pieces are ever the same!
What's the big deal about "wood firing"?
Many potters heat their kilns with electricity, gas, oil, or other heat sources. These are great ways to fire pottery, especially because they can be controlled easily and they are reproducible.
A woodfired kiln is much less predictable, but the combustion gases and ash from the wood do some really neat things for the potter. The kiln gets so hot (I fire to about 2370 F) that the wood ash melts and forms a glass on the pot! Look at this pot: NO glaze was applied to the outside of the pot. That toasty color and glaze look is entirely from smoke, fire, and melted ash impacting the pot on their way from the firebox through the "ware chamber", to the chimney. Because one side of the pot faces the fire and the other faces away, there is a great variation from one side to the other. Sometimes you can even see "shadows" from the pots that were "upstream"- leaving a permanent mark and telling the story of how it was fired.
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