SOUTH OF CLOUDS
Fired once.
For three days.
Never again.
A wood-fired teaware house from Yunnan. Every piece is fired once, for three days, by one person — and no two are the same.
Unglazed
No glaze was applied. Everything you see was made by fire and ash alone.
Iron in the clay turned rust-red where the flame reached it and scorched brown where it did not. The vertical marks are from trimming, still visible because nothing was put over them.
The Place
Yunnan means South of Clouds
The name is a description of the weather. Cloud comes up from the south and sits against the plateau for most of the year, which is why the clay here is wet, iron-heavy, and difficult.
We work with stoneware dug and mixed within a day’s drive of the kiln. Nothing is imported. The iron in it is what turns red in the fire and black where the flame did not reach.
The Fire
Three days, one ton of pine, no glaze
Nothing is glazed. Every surface you see was made by ash and flame alone — ash settling on the shoulder of a pot, fluxing at twelve hundred degrees, and cooling into something between glass and stone.
The kiln is fed by hand through the nights. Temperature climbs slowly to about 1280 °C and is held there. Where a piece stands decides everything: a shelf in the flame path takes heavy ash, a corner behind a shelf-brick takes almost none.
The Hands
Seven pieces in ten come out
Of sixty pieces loaded, about forty-two survive. The rest crack in the cooling, or the ash eats through a wall, or a lid warps out of true. A teapot has four parts that all have to come through the same three days together — that is why there are so few of them.
Nothing is repeated. We do not make a design twice, because we cannot: the fire decides the surface, and the fire is never the same.
Most recent firing
Kiln 23 — 3 days, 1 ton of pine
The third day was windless, so the ash fell straight down instead of drifting. That is why the pieces on the upper shelves carry more ash than the ones below.
Get notified when the next kiln opens
One letter per firing. Nothing else, ever.