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About the Potter

• Michael Gaitskell was educated at Winchester College.
• He graduated in history from Exeter University in 1970.
• He sought to achieve a work/life balance.
• Because of the varied mental, artistic and physical disciplines required, making pottery offered irresistible attractions.
• Reading Bernard Leach’s ‘A Potter’s Book’ encouraged his enthusiasm for potting as a way of life.
• Apart from 2 months learning to throw in a professional workshop, Michael is self-taught.
• Many years were spent with his wife renovating ancient buildings of a Domesday Mill into workshops, building kilns, installing a waterwheel and acquiring the skills to make pots that people would want to buy.
• The last 30 years have been spent selling successfully and directly to visitors to Mill Pottery, developing new work, and the means to stimulate interest in a remarkable artefact.
• His interests as well as ceramics include, history, geology, volcanology, music, politics and the way we live now.
• Michael Gaitskell is a member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen and is the retired Chairman and Hon. President of the West Country Potters Association.

About the Pots

Michael Gaitskell ceramics are thrown on the wheel and turned to form a well-balanced pot. The designs are drawn freehand, then incised onto the surface while the clay is impressionable. After a ‘biscuit’ firing at 980 degrees C, the structure of the design is waxed to resist the glazes. The glazes are all researched and made at Mill Pottery. To achieve the tactile and visual contrasts of texture and colour I desire, the glazes are painted onto the biscuitware which is meticulous and slow work! A second firing at 1300 degrees C, cone 11, vitrifies and metamorphoses the clay into rock, hence being called ‘stoneware’ and fuses the glazes.

A Potter’s Perspective

It is my experience that despite, or perhaps because pots are used by everyone, every day, there is understandable ignorance about how they are made, and it remains a mystery how archaeologists find out so much from just shards of pots.

Therefore this part of the website will be updated from time to time to highlight different aspects that make a handmade pot so interesting.

Technology of the Kiln

I write on the home page that I think that a handmade pot is symbolic of human creativity in four disciplines. The one I want to illustrate here is technology and the control of volcanic heat in the kiln where pots go through an amazing ceramic transformation. Discovery of this technology about twelve and a half thousand years ago remains speculative. Since then knowledge of materials used to produce and control the required heat has advanced over the years until today when kilns contain spaceage insulation material. Materials used to make bricks, batts or shelves, props and insulation are derived from alumina silicates, basically clay! These withstand the loading weight and withstand volcanic temperatures firing after firing.Resourcing, processing and manufacturing these products involves considerable technology, illustrated by kilns and the pots fired in them.

So how is heat in kilns controlled? From pots piled up on open bonfires covered with sticks,grass or dung, kiln design developed into a variety of structures but only one involved a method of heat control that worked much more efficiently.Everyone knows that heat or hot air rises but whereas most kilns were updraught, the Chinese established the practice of trapping the heat and pulling it back downwards, leaving the kiln chamber by flues at the bottom. They established the tradition of impressive downdraught climbing kilns fired with wood in which the temperatures where sufficiently high enough to produce quantities of beautiful stonewares and porcelains many centuries before Europeans. Kilns incorporating similar downdraught methods were not pursued in the West until mid-Victorian times! Just imagine how different things would have turned out if Marco Polo had known about this technological advantage and divulged it to the Venetians.

The advantages of downdraught as opposed to updraught kilns are considerable namely: more intense heat from less fuel;a more evenly distributed temperature greatly benefitting pot production and quality; and finally, because the hot gasses leave from the bottom not the top of the kiln chamber, like a heat exchanger, they are used to pre-heat subsequent chambers.Great economy all round and less carbon release too! Here at Mill Pottery the second "biscuit" chamber reaches 800 degrees centigrade entirely because of the hotter gasses from the glaze chamber.

In the biscuit chamber where pots can be stacked upon one another, raw greenware clay pots go through the irriversible ceramic change. At a top temperature of around 1000 degrees,they become soft rock or terracotta, insoluble in water and ideal for glazing.

It requires volcanic heat of 1300 degrees centigrade to take the pots through a molecular restructuring, a chemical change turning what was soft clay into dense, hard vitrified rock that will endure geologically, hence the name, stoneware. This heat also melts and fuses what were crushed and powdered rocks into glazes coloured completely differently from before they are fired. An amazing and challenging technological process. Every opening of the kiln is a Howard Carter experience! Even with years experience, I never know exactly what each pot is going to look like, but usually there are some real treasures to inspire me back on the potters wheel.

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