Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Hidea Mabuchi | Episode 792
Hideo Mabuchi discovered ceramics well after completing his formal education, but it has become something like a second career for him – one that Hideo strives to integrate and cross-pollinate with his teaching and research roles as a Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University.
SPONSORS
You can help support the show!
GRPotteryForms.com
Number 1 brand in America for a reason. Skutt.com
For all your ceramic needs go to Georgies.com
What is your favorite scientific idea that has come alive when you started doing ceramics?
So all through college and graduate school if you asked me what are two scientific subjects that I really don’t get into that I’m kind of bad at and couldn’t care less about those would have been chemistry and geology. Now doing woodfire ceramics you realize some things. Even if you are doing glaze chemistry, chemistry is really a big thing to understand as a ceramics person technically and it’s been kind of an amazing surprise to realize, and I am sure there are people that know this already, when you woodfire bare clay the thing that you are doing is really a whole lot like geology. Because clay is just weathered minerals of the earth’s crust, so clay is made up of the stuff that the earth is made out of. When you woodfire at high temperatures your surfaces get fluxed out a little bit by the kiln atmosphere so you have a little skin of molten earth on the surface of your pots. It’s basically lava or magma and then as that cools you’ll get crystals forming and kind of like minerals or gems forming in a lava tube as it cools, you know the way that it cools, how much oxygen is present as it cools, that’s what determines the sorts of colors and textures you are going to have.
Are you suggesting that given enough time a pot can be turned back into clay that would eventually be re-fired again?
So from my understanding of the minerology there it takes an incredibly long time for vitrified clay to decompose out of natural processes, like hundreds of thousands or millions of years. So it would be a really, really long time but eventually, yeah. Or I suppose there must be acids you could use that accelerate the process.
So you are saying we just need patience.
You just need patience, yes. But it is a point that many potters have made. We like to think of the ceramic process as starting from opening a bag of clay and finishing when we pull the thing out of the kiln but that is usually days, weeks, months, at the most but if you think of the lifetime of that material in the long arch of things that’s just a tiny flash in the life of that stuff.
You said you fire as a group. Do you ever get together and make with friends?
You know that is something that I wish there were a good way to do. Many people that I know in ceramics, and I think definitely within woodfire ceramics they often comment that it would be great to do that kind of thing. A few times when I have been fortunate enough to do some residencies or at the university, those kind of times when you are wheel to wheel with some other people you like as friends, you are interested in their work, you just see how people do things and what everybody is making. That’s great. I do not have the good fortune to be able to do that hardly ever these days.
What is the main idea you bring from your ceramic world into your classroom?
So one of my main motivations in wanting to do teaching that combines studio work with classroom work I think is especially in the physical sciences. We’ve gotten really bad at helping students to learn by doing. Especially undergraduate physics education these days is so much about received wisdom. You sit the students down in the lecture hall, you tell them stuff, and then you test them on how well able they are to apply that or spit it back to you. Whereas doing research isn’t like that at all. Research is trying to figure things out that nobody else knows yet. So in fact, doing things with clay whether it’s trying to make things on the wheel or figuring out how to fire your work, there really is no other way to learn it or to figure out what you want to do. You just have to do it.
There are laws of physics. Do you have any laws of the studio that just have to be?
You mean in terms of my own work?
Yes.
Working habits that I might elevate to the level of laws are, you know, I try not to over wedge my clay. I like it to be a little lumpy and weird. I try to get away with not perfectly centering clay on the wheel. Those things are important. And I try not to envision a specific form when I am starting to make something. I try to decide ahead of time is the process that I am going to go through. I am going to open this form and bring it up like a conical sort of form and then I am going to take some darts and close it back up and that’s going to be my piece. That’s the extent of how I will think about and I will just kind of see what happens.
Do you ever see yourself as becoming a ceramic teacher? An academic teacher?
So my whole notion of what it is to be a teacher has really been evolving a lot these past few years, so depending on what you mean. I don’t see myself leaving the university setting and see myself teaching just studio ceramics in the traditional way. On the other hand I kind of can’t imagine going into the future now teaching at a university without incorporating ceramics into what I do. This may sound strange but I often have this thought, You know, My primary creative outlet these days is actually the experimental teaching that I do.
Book
Six Drawing Lessons by William Kentridge
Contact
Instagram: @firemousehm