Anagama kiln, where people and pottery talk to each other
Among the wonders of wood-fired ceramics is the unexpected.
Spots, streaks, and stains appear on art pieces made of clay in the anagama kiln in the woods north of Willamina.
East Creek Art in the mossy Coast Range foothills is where this woodfire-brewed alchemy takes place: heat, ash, and moving air spell serendipity, imbedding patterns and creating designs — with little control by the artists.
The place is itself unexpected, located six miles north of Willamina up a winding dirt road along East Creek.
East Creek is studio and retreat and also the new home of Eutectic Gallery, where examples of one ceramics expert’s work, that of Hamish Jackson, are now on display through mid-April. The gallery moved there from Portland in mid-2024, and is co-owned by Joe Robinson, longtime artist and ceramics instructor, and Anneliese Kiefer, who teaches at Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg.
Robinson has owned East Creek for 10 years, but he and Kiefer inherited a deeply grounded — literally — Yamhill County arts tradition: the anagama kiln. Built into the hillside in 1985, kiln construction was guided by the late Nils Lou, Tom Pullman, and Frank Boyden. “Doing the heavy lifting” in the 1985 design process was Sheridan potter Ruri, a native of Japan, who was on hand last month for Jackson’s show, called “Unwinding.”
Then there was the “unloading”: thousands of newly-fired pieces emerged from the anagama on Feb. 1. With slightly less fanfare, the above-ground catenary kiln at East Creek was also opened up and unloaded on Feb. 1.
Unloading is a community effort, as most of those helping have inside at least one creation — cup, bowl, plate, or larger clay item — and they wait to see theirs emerge from the cooled-off, but still warm, anagama while also getting a first look at the works of others.
Admire and pass, and wait … “There’s mine!” was frequently heard somewhere along the line.
The shared anticipation of the unknown results is an almost palpable part of the unloading event – a true kilnship. Artists rent one or more “cubes” or cubic feet of space, and also commit to helping out with loading, unloading and other assistance at the studio.
“It’s a team sport,” Kiefer said. “Unloading happens in an afternoon but building the whole structure with bricks and refraction material (known as wadding) is a three-day process.”
Bricks are arranged as shelves in varying heights and widths to accommodate the clay pieces. This creates multiple surfaces. The heat rises as if through multiple chambers, and the clay items attract and respond to the fuels in different places and angles, yielding the marbling, pebbling, dripping or smearing impacts.
“This is super exciting,” Robinson said on Feb. 1. “This is the best day to come. It’s a really good firing. This is exciting, we only do this style of firing, reduction-cooled firing, once a year in January. …
“East Creek has evolved over the years, but the kiln has been the center of it all. This year is the anniversary date as it was first fired in 1985,” Robinson said.
“This is my 10th anniversary of being the current steward of the place,” Robinson said. An artist with an MFA in ceramics who taught at Linfield, he said, “I think of myself more as a business person, like the bar pilots who guide huge ships to a specific place. I’m like a bar pilot with specified firings, but overall, these people know what they’re doing and my skills aren’t really needed. The community knows what they’re doing.”
Located at 12251 S.W. East Creek Road, East Creek will host workshops and other events that are in the planning for 2025 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the anagama. Eutectic Gallery is open weekends, but appointments are advised, at eutecticgallery.com
Among the artists helping was McMinnville’s Marilyn Kosel, who last year took up pottery again after a 25-year break.
“This is gratifying: I can create it, let it go and see what happens,” Kosel said. She enjoys the unknown factors in reduction-cooled kilning, in which the kiln is shut down and deprived of oxygen – though portals are opened not only for fueling and observation but for creating variations of heat and air movement.
“It feels pretty amazing, actually,” Kosel said. “You put all the time into designing a piece. You draw it first, do a lot of planning and then create the piece, and to see them come out … this is the part you have no control over.
“You control all those early steps but you can’t control what it looks like coming out of the kiln. Which is what I kind of like about it.”
The ceramic creations are symbiotic: the shape and size of one piece affects the way temperature and fuel leave marks on its neighbors. One of Kosel’s works has a tennis ball-sized hole in it, a passage that creates a dynamic with its neighbors.
“Every piece talks to the piece next to it,” Kiefer said, “and makes some of the swirls and dry spots and wet spots.”
These artistic connections are echoed on the thrice-annual unloading — the kiln is opened up and the pieces passed out and placed on tables in the open air, by two lines of 25 or more people.
Admire and pass, admire and pass.
“You’ve got people who just started making pottery, others who have been doing it for decades, and professional artists,” Kiefer said, including one who made dozens of items that will go to restaurants
“Some of the people here do it as a hobby and others for a living,” Kiefer said.
One of those is Darah Lundberg of Portland, who’s been firing at East Creek for a number of years.
“It’s great. It’s a little bit feral, but it’s nice,” Lundberg said. “I think this is the only place where you can sign up for cubes, and you get brand new artists as well as professionals. For every two cubic feet you buy, you do an eight-hour work shift, and it gives you the opportunity to come and learn from people who have more experience than you.”
As a teacher, Kiefer was eager to see the works from teenage students in her Chehalem Cultural Center classes.
“They look awesome! I’m so excited,” Kiefer said. She points to a dripping black spot on one and explains the dynamics of heat, ash and minimal human intervention in the firing:
“This is dry spot where the flame wraps around. It’s black because it’s reduction cooled, which is where once we do a hot and gassy firing, we shut the kiln down and plug it up and let the fire keep getting all the oxygen to the point where it pulls oxygen out of the clay box. It disrupts the surfaces,” Kiefer explained.
“It’s looking for anything with the iron oxide on it or anything with oxide on it, to eat that oxygen and then we open it back up after seven hours and start heating it with wet wood, so we’re giving it fuel but we’re forcing the temperatures down by feeding it. So we’re getting these pillars of flame coming out of the side of it. It’s reaching out to grab the oxygen. It’s gnarly. I like seeing it, and you can hear it.”
During unloading, the pieces are arranged on open tables in order of their removal.
“We leave it out according to how it comes out of the kiln, so we get a sense of the trajectory of the ash,” Kiefer explained.
“You get these all kind of destroyed pieces in the front and they get more subtle as the atmosphere is moving through the kiln. People can look at it and understand what happened where. If this were up front they would have lost these little checks, but they got this interesting atmosphere. Versus other parts where it’s more drippy. We just try to figure out where the different effects come from. A lot of is very unpredictable.”
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