It looks like magic, but ceramicist Rick Stafford says it’s chemistry.
Stafford’s plates and platters, on view at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts, are lustrous ponds with swimming goldfish, lily pads afloat and hovering dragonflies, made by merging an ancient Japanese method of pigmenting clay with a technique he pioneered for turning porcelain to glass.
“It began as a mistake,” Stafford said. “I was an undergraduate student at Central Washington State in the late 1960s when I fired a kiln too high and a cup melted. The lip of the cup was still there, and I thought it was really cool.”
But taking the happy accident and adjusting it to fit the parameters of the artist’s vision – and then duplicating the process with enough precision to build a body of work – has been arduous.
It would have been impossible without the rigorous training Stafford received at the college.
During the late 1960s when Stafford attended, the school was noted for its outstanding art department, and ceramics instructor Richard Fairbanks was central to his training.
“He was a ceramic chemist,” Stafford said. “He explained the molecular changes so we understood the process, but he gave us no formulas. He said, ‘You figure it out.’
“I don’t think I could have made use of the happy accident without the European-school approach that was his background. His idea was that you were here to really learn something.”
Stafford learned to fuse porcelain at about 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that turns the clay to glass. It’s an unforgiving process, requiring such precision that 10 minutes too long in the kiln means a piece may crack or burn up.
Later, Stafford adapted the ancient technique of neriage. In contrast with conventional glazed surfaces, the technique laminates differently pigmented clay bodies to create colored designs.
“I was embossing an image done in neriage onto a background, and then I thought, ‘Why not melt it?’” Stafford said.
Once again, moving from idea to product took fantastic persistence. Stafford did 100 different color tests in the first year alone.
Stafford describes the process of melding the neriage pieces with the porcelain as “applique, like quilting.”
The imagery is drawn from the features of his daily life – the pond in his yard stocked with koi.
The finished pieces blurring the distinction between glass and clay are in demand nationally.
Since 1999, Stafford has been invited into exclusive American Craft Council wholesale/retail shows in Baltimore and San Francisco and in an exhibit at Museum of American Craft.
“I’m five years into the process of fusing neriage with porcelain,” Stafford said. “I don’t think anyone’s done it in 5,000 years of ceramics.
“It comes down to balancing the coefficient of expansion between clay bodies. It comes down to chemistry.”
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Rick Stafford’s fused porcelain neriage ceramics are on view at BAC through Feb. 9. Call 842-3132 for more information.
