Structured Unpredictability

research phase in collaboration with Michela Segato

2016

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What are the traces that natural materials leave on ceramic when you burn them together wrapped in aluminium foil?

 

This ancient method of creating confined atmospheres within a container is called Saggar firing.

Every round of  firing, in our self-made kiln, gives unpredictable results. These are based on amount of natural material, shape of the ceramics, place in the kiln, temperature, time, kind of Saggar and moment of opening the Saggar.

 

To get grip on this unpredictability a structured research is needed, which I translated into objects. Every series of stackable ceramics represents structured experiments with the natural material as a constant and the firing time as a variable.