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Forrest Middelton | Episode 548
Forrest Middelton is back on The Potters Cast! You may remember Forrest as the source of the amazing tool, The Studio Sander. You may also remember Forrest as an amazing artist that creates functional wares and his amazing tiles. Forrest has now written a book on tile making. If you are looking for a step-by-step guide, Forrest’s book has it, but it is much more. It also dives into the history of tiles, design, and installation.
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If one doesn’t have a press to help dry out the clay, how does one dry out their clay so it is flat?
That’s a great question. I don’t use a press. I have a hydraulic press and I don’t use it yet. I will probably use it for pots. I have had it for awhile and I just don’t have time to make molds. Anyway, I extrude my tile out of a pug mill. So it squirts it out the end like a Playdoh Fun Factory. It looks like a big candy bar coming out of the machine. It is akin to rolling a tile. One of the things I go over in the book is how you roll a tile and keep it flat with a rolling pin. There is a lot of different ways to make a tile flat. One of them is pounding it with a mallet and cutting the back off. The most important thing that I think gets overlooked is don’t touch it, don’t breath on it wrong, don’t look at it incorrectly, don’t tell jokes about its mama. Don’t mess with the tile because it is going to win every time.
Basically what we do is we extrude it and you can do this rolling it as well, and we do it on sheet rock, so dry wall. It is plaster encased in paper and it is very durable. It goes onto that sheet rock and it never gets picked up. You want to avoid handling it and picking it up and that sort of thing. So this goes to the question. What do you do when you cut it? So we extrude it onto sheet rock or you can roll it onto sheet rock and then we have baker’s racks that we slide that sheet rock onto and they hold about 20 boards, which for us is either 140 or 220 tile. Then we leave them for about an hour. Then we cut them with a roller cutter, it’s like six pizza cutters on a bar. You can cut with a pizza cutter too, which is a great way to cut tile because if you do it right it doesn’t track like a knife blade does because it is rolling through the tile and it is easier to hold vertically. A knife blade if you hold it straight up and down it can tilt a little bit and then you undercut one and you over cut the other. So it creates this cut that is not vertical. So once it is cut we leave it again. We just leave it alone. We don’t stack drywall on top of it. Some people make tile on drywall and put another sheet on top and if that works in your environment that’s great. And you want to keep it out of any breezes. Any kind of breeze will create problems.
On the pastry wheel, is it better to pull the wheel toward you or is it better to push the wheel away from you?
We push it away so that the last action is going back in and our cutter is in a bath of water-based oil, so when it cuts through the clay it is lubricated. Actually, we make it, we print it, and then we cut it. Then we move it on to the racks. Once it is maybe chocolate hard, a little harder than leather hard., we then put it on open air racks where it is open on top and on bottom.
Is that for drying evenly?
Yes, because if you leave it on the drywall, number one, it will saturate the drywall too much, but number two, the tile won’t dry on bottom quite quickly enough. So from the sheet rock we kind of slide it onto our hand when it is stiff enough and we can’t bend it. The key is don’t ever bend it. Picking up tile bends it and it’s a hard thing to teach people. When my studio assistants are first making it they have to learn if you are going to move it, slide it on the board, don’t pick it up and move it because you create a bend.
Do you put something on the drywall to help it to slide? Sand or anything like that?
Nope, nothing at all.
Does tile have to be glossy?
No, and that is a fine line to walk actually. So on a technical end, you’ve got all kinds of different types of tile and two of the more common tiles are earthenware tiles and porcelain tile. Just think about that for a second and think how different a porcelain cup is from an earthenware cup. If you leave your coffee in your earthenware cup and then you dump it out a day later and you tap on it, it doesn’t ring the same way it did the day before because it has been saturated. Earthenware is like a sponge, it is not vitrified. If you leave your coffee in a porcelain cup and dump it out and wash it, it will ring the same. So tile comes in three categories. One is earthenware tile, one is stoneware tile, and the final one is porcelain tile. It is funny because it is a bit of a misnomer that relates to potters, porcelain tile, when someone says, Is your tile porcelain? What they mean is , is it vitrified. They are not asking you if it is primarily made of feldspar, they are just asking if it is vitrified. You can vitrify an iron rich stoneware to 2 percent or lower. The industry standard in tile is, if you want to call it porcelain tile, it just needs to be vitrified to 2 percent or lower. So I could take my tile, which is stoneware about 2 percent absorption, and call it porcelain. Obviously it is not, it’s black stoneware. So it’s a little bit confusing and I go over all that in my book.
That all being said, I don’t glaze my tile either. I use a vitrified slip and that vitrified slip gets polished on the studio sander. One of the nice things is that it is not slippery and it’s got a grippier surface, so it is a little more tactile, and it also doesn’t have glaze covering the design, which can be protective.
Why should a potter consider history in terms of making tile?
The first chapter in the book is a chapter that is just about the history of making tile and I wish I could have written an entire book on the history of tile because personally it is very selfish, I want to learn more about the history of tile. But it is the foundation of everything.The Ishtar Gate is one of the first examples of tile that was discovered from way, way back when. It was one of the Seven Wonders of the World and it’s this example of glazed tile. It as kind of one of these early examples of using tile not only as architecture and construction but also as decoration. And because clay is one of the oldest and longest lasting relic of human record keeping, so to speak, papyrus goes way back but the majority of it gets burned or falls apart or whatever. Tile doesn’t do that. People were using tile for ledgers and you take that and add a little bit more technology and you can paint it or put glaze on it and then it becomes this discovery of…if this is the best way for us to keep records then let’s do our best. Let’s put our most important stuff down here. That could be religious records or the meditative act of geometry…
Or sound.
That’s a good point!
Yes, because you have done it.
I did! Yes, I got a McKnight fellowship from the Northern Clay Center a couple of years ago and did this body of work that was so cool and I had been wanting to do it forever. About ten or fifteen years ago I saw this thing called a Chladni Plate. It is a metal plate that vibrates and you set the plate to a certain frequency and then you pour sand on it and that frequency generates pattern out of sand.
And it’s the same pattern every time, right?
It’s the same pattern every time for that specific frequency. And then you dial the tone generator from 2057 MHz to 3020 MHz and like that, instantaneously it becomes a completely different pattern.
Who is your book aimed to reach?
It is a pretty broad kind of burst. My editor said, No matter what you write, your audience is going to be the how-to craft audience, and honestly that is The Potters Cast audience too, right? So it is kind of that same audience. With that said, it is a book about tile, which is very different than a book about pots. I am trying to reach a pretty broad audience. I knew that no matter what I wrote it is going to be pulled back into this genre of how-to for potters. If you want to make a back splash for your own house, if you are a potter, you have the means at your disposal. How can I teach you how to put it on a wall or how can I teach you how to calculate square footage.
Book
Handmade Tile by Forrest Lesch-Middleton
Contact
Instagram: @forrestmiddelton