By Laura Turner Igoe As a curator and art historian who has written about the material ecologies of American art and culture, I find that my understanding of artwork is always enriched by working directly with materials. Recent exhibitions and a growing collection of ceramic pieces at the James A. Michener Art Museum, where I…

The White Room by Oscar Salguero The color white is the absence of memory. -Stephen King NYC, 2027 85 degrees in May.  Biking through the Manhattan Bridge. Up Second Avenue. Eighty blocks left to the Met. A friend once told me that people in New Orleans wear long sleeve shirts in the Summer. As you…

By Rosa Glaessner Novak A photograph of a long, spotted rock spans page 128 of the Ontario Department of Mines’ 1960 report, “Nepheline Syenite Deposits of Southern Ontario.”[1] The rock is composed of three bands: one white and fibrous, one tinted pink from iron, and the last, a cloudy gray that “in hand specimens” appears almost…

Photo Credit Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters We are continuing research on this material to clarify the source and supply chain for the Nickel used in the pottery studio. As with many of the heavy metal oxide and carbonates, they are mostly mined and refined for purposes other than studio ceramics. For example Nickel is one of the…

We will be updating this post in the future but until then you can download our full research PDF on silica here. Our regional supplier buys Silica directly from the company US Silica. US Silica supplies most of the silica used for clays and glazes in the US. US Silica has mine locations across the…

By Rose Stainthorpe 1600 feet underground, beneath layers of sandstone and shale, there is a network of roads, spanning miles and miles. Lights overhead illuminate the rasped walls and low ceilings of rooms and tunnels—there is a whole human world down here, of streets, bathrooms, maintenance shops, not to mention, hulking, colossal machines. One of…

Wollastonite, also known as calcium metasilicate and composed of calcium, silicon, and oxygen, was named after the British scientist William Hyde Wollaston who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It’s a versatile mineral with diverse applications. In ceramics, wollastonite improves green strength and reduces crazing thanks to its unique acicular or needle-like…

The Zircopax or Zirconium Silicate we use in the studio is supplied to Laguna Clay by the company Chemours. Chemours mines Zirconium Silicate mostly in Florida using a process called “suction dredging”. We believe the most likely source of our Zircopax is the mine site located just east of Starke Florida. We plan to update…