Wave Kilns I-III

Left: Wave Kiln I, night firing, 8 ft. long, steel, ceramic fiber blanket, propane, brick platform, Mills College, Oakland, CA 1982.

Middle: Wave Kiln II, night firing, 12 ft. long, steel, ceramic fiber blanket, propane, brick platform, Mills College, Oakland, CA 1982.

Right: Wave Kiln III, installation, 40 ft. long, steel, ceramic fiber blanket, Kiln Projects: Works in Progress, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA. 1982.

Wave Kilns I-II were fired as part of an on-going series of experimental projects began in the late 1970's, to examine the idea of a kiln as an agent of transformation. The Wave Kilns I-III produce no ceramic product in the normal sense, they are filled with only fire, forming effigies of luminous waves in mid-crash. The firings of Wave Kilns I-II were documented to produce mural-sized photographic images of the material/image transformation used in the exhibtion, Kiln Projects: Works in Progress, centered around the much larger Wave Kiln III, which has never been fired.

The images elude to the firing of the larger wave, extending its potential life into a conceptual dimension, of unlimited scale. Wave Kilns I-III extend traditional sculptural concepts of casting and molds, by the filling of a shaped kiln/mold of a material, water, engaged in another transitory process, with another transitory material/process, fire.

At the time of firing of Wave Kiln's I-II, at Mills College in 1982, several other, related kiln works were produced: Wave Kilns I-II (Synthetic Landscape), and Study: Dendritic Kiln (Steam).

 

Furnace Projects, Constance Lewallan;

Kiln Projects: Material and Process Experiments in/of the Landscape, John Roloff