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JIM STOUT
JIM STOUT
I’ve been working with clay since 1992, and am primarily self-taught. I am a recently retired pediatrician and have evolved from being a passionate hobbyist to working with clay full-time. My work ranges from table ware to outdoor installations, and lots in between, limited only by imagination and curiosity. Much of my work is wood-fired, which involves turning control over to my Thai-style anagama kiln, Penelope, who decides the final results. Like many who create with clay, I like to work in series,and study the possibilities and outer limits of a form.
Sometimes a theme will grab me—in this case, the cairn—a pile of stones used to mark the way forward. Exploring the shape, color and texture of stones made from clay also evokes the idea of more than one way forward. I am curious to see where the cairns guide me next.
Cairn Reflections: A cairn is a human-made pile or stack of stones, used to mark a trail, a border, or a being’s memory. That’s what it meant to me initially, a marker that shows the way, and a metaphor for a fork in life’s road, awaiting decision. I was happy with that meaning, but a Gray Sky customer offered a new perspective. For her and her husband, involved in a cancer journey, the cairn represented a link between the spiritual and physical, like the Old Testament story of Jacob’s Ladder. As the passage goes, Jacob used a stone as a pillow and dreamed of a stairway connecting earth and heaven, complete with angel two-way traffic. Like most family stories, this one is more complicated, but why not this beautiful meaning for a cairn?
Our kiln community employs the ancient practice of firing ceramics with wood. My kiln is a Thai-style wood-fired anagama (cave kiln) named Penelope. She’s a large kiln, holding over 500 pieces in a firing, and requires about four cords of wood and two days of continuous stoking by a series of crews. Since 2004, she’s been fired 21 times, and counting.
As the kiln temperature rises above 2200 degrees, the clay surface becomes sticky, and the ash flying by can now adhere to the piece. The “stones” in this cairn (or Jacob’s Ladder, if you prefer) are actually two thick bowl forms attached together with clay slip and then further trimmed and burnished. An opening is carved in the top and bottom before the intermediate “bisque” firing. Then, the hollow forms can be stacked on a central pole, like beads on a string.
The pieces in this cairn are all made from the same clay body and are white after the bisque fire. I leave them unglazed going into the anagama. After the wood fire, their dissimilarities tell the story of different micro-environments and circumstances throughout the kiln. Some ride high on a shelf, others are buried in coals on the floor of the firebox, like siblings with different life experiences. By design, and also somewhat out of my control, each piece is fired imperfectly. Taken together, their imperfections and differences become a thing of interest, and dare I say, beauty, the sum of them greater than the imperfect parts. My attempt is to stay out of the way, and let the kiln and the unglazed clay fully express themselves.
And finally, there is the collective wisdom of the trees that bathe the clay in heat and imbue it with ash. Their annual growth rings unfurl in the fire, transforming into rivulets of heat and light. The intense heat removes carbon from the equation, leaving behind each tree’s unique chemical footprint—Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Red Alder. Red alder, a fast-growing deciduous “weed” tree native to the Pacific Northwest, isn’t much to look at, as trees go. But wow, what amazing surfaces that wood creates. A wise, tree-loving person said something like, if you’re going to take down a tree, you need to try and create something as special and miraculous as the tree itself. Okay! Gauntlet thrown. I offer the cairn.
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