The most important aspect of my stay in Ghana at Aba’s house was the human quality of the people I met there. Aba’s house is like a magnet , there is a permanent coming and going of children, neighbors, local workers, artists coming to show their work and share a talk with Aba and her friends, visiting artists from other countries, local craftsmen and everybody is open to listen to somebody else’s experience and the atmosphere is very light and joyful.
The idea of the workshop was to continue the work done by Barbara in august, however the participants being different persons we worked on new ideas. Each person made several sketches and a maquette of one of the ideas and then the group chose three projects to work on collectively, due to time limitations. I had to work on those projects during the following days in order to complete them and Emmanuel and Edward came back several times to help. None of these projects was fired as they required a very slow drying process. I was quite impressed by the level of training and knowledge of the participants in the workshop, their main interest or worry I should say, was the difficulties in developing glazes as they are not produced locally and raw materials are not easy to find. Finding white clay is another problem. Anyway we decided to make some glaze tests for cone 4, assuming that with Kaolin, Feldspar, Calcium Carbonate and Dolomite which are produced locally we should be able to develop a white glaze. We worked on a series of combinations of those four materials in different proportions using a spoon for measuring as no scale was available. I also made three clay tests mixing white clay and red clay in different proportions to see if we could develop a body for middle range temperature.
Sammy came to help with the firing which was rather problematic, we started very late in the morning because of the rain and because we had to fetch the gas cylinder. The pieces were not thoroughly dry so we started a very slow fire with the kiln half open, increasing little by little the gas pressure but keeping the gauge on 0. After twelve hours we closed the kiln completely and started increasing the pressure up to 1,5. We had a lot of smoke in the first stage of the firing because of the design of the burners which doesn’t allow a primary air control, so that they don’ t produce a good combustion unless you have a lot of pressure. When we started having colour there was no way of having an oxidizing or neutral atmosphere, the kiln doesn’t have a chimney and there isn’t enough draft, so we had all the time a flame at the spy hole. At 5 o’clock in the morning we decided to stop the firing and we had reached cone 06 only, so none of the tests melted. In order to get more temperature some adjustments should be done like adding a small chimney and designing a way of controlling the primary air intake in the burners, so that combustion is more efficient, this is very important considering that gas is quite expensive. I felt frustrated at not having been able to reach cone 4, so I brought back samples of the raw materials and the clays and I will make the tests in my workshop with my students.
My personal reflections after the workshop are that the people that work with clay in Ghana are overwhelmed by the difficulties in finding the materials and covering the costs of production on one side and on the other side I think there is a certain conceptual confusion as to what type of ceramic one should create. I had the feeling that ceramists feel the need to make a clear difference between traditional pottery and art, and that traditional pots are usually considered too simple, so that artistic pots should be more complex and should reflect personal expression, should have a lot of colour, and should comply with the expectations of foreign buyers.
The other important aspect is that there is a lot of interest in what potters do in other countries but practically very little access to information. I had taken with me some slides but as no projector was available it was impossible to use them as a starting point for conceptual discussion. I tried to emphasize the fact that for western ceramicists African traditional pottery is a source of inspiration and that maybe it would be worthwhile to try to work with what is available and find a personal expression within the local limitations and I thought that the sculptural work Francis presented at the Alliance Française corresponded exactly to that concept. Besides a majority of the participants seemed more interested in sculpture than in functional ware so glazes shouldn’t be such a problem. For further research I would suggest working with different clays and natural pigments in order to develop several bodies, for low and middle range firing. I think that a line of slips could be developed using the same materials . I also suggested trying a self setting body which is a mixture of clay and cement that can be modeled and doesn’t need to be fired and can be painted in different ways and is very convenient for large scale work. For functional ware I will make the tests and I think a white glaze can be developed for cone 4 and natural pigments could be used for decoration. On the esthetic side it would be interesting to open discussion, using slides or magazines, on different ways of dealing with clay in the work of contemporary artists.
— Gigliola Caneschi