FIRE AND ICE Hudson potters create colorful raku work using kiln and cold

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In the fading light of afternoon, the sun streams through the windows of a small, rough-hewn shed a few hundred feet from Pushaw Pond in Hudson. On half-log shelves that run the length of the shed, shiny pots and mismatched lids line the walls.

In the center of the dirt-floored room, heat and orange light rise from a small hole on top of a white-brick, gas-fired kiln. John Moore peers through the hole at the pots inside, their glaze pocked like an orange peel. It’s almost showtime.

All at once, the glaze loses its wrinkles and turns slick. Moore turns off the gas line, grabs a handful of sawdust and throws it into a hole at the bottom of the kiln. It catches fire and sucks the oxygen out in a process called “redox,” or reduction and oxidation. With a pulley, Moore lifts the cover of the kiln, and with a pair of long-handled metal tongs, carefully extracts a red-hot pot from its belly.

“Blow!” he says.

Ryan Lucier, Bobby Johnson and Moore’s wife, Lucille, crouch in a circle around the glowing pot, pucker their lips and exhale frantically. Where their breath hits the pot, the glaze shrinks and cracks, making a sound like sleet bouncing off a windshield.

The trio backs off and Moore drops the pot into a barrel of sawdust. A mushroom cloud of fire bursts from the barrel and inky smoke pours out. Moore coughs and looks away, then he throws more sawdust inside to stoke the flames. When the fire really gets rolling, Moore throws a heavy lid over the barrel and, with nowhere else to go, the smoke wheedles its way into the cracks in the glaze as the fire suffocates.

“You smell like you just cleaned a chimney at the end of the day,” Moore says through the smoke.

A few minutes later, Moore pulls off the lid, grasps the pot with his tongs, and throws it into a snowbank to cool. Lucier tops it off with a shovelful of snow from a waiting wheelbarrow.

Moore returns to the kiln and pulls out another glowing pot – this one covered in a copper glaze – and drops it into a pile of sawdust on the ground outside. Through a puff of smoke, he and Lucier throw oil-soaked strips of cloth around the pot and the pile ignites, then Moore covers the fire with an overturned barrel.

Five minutes pass, and he lifts the barrel. In the smoldering pile of wood shavings, colors dance around the pot like gasoline in a puddle. When the colors look right to Moore, he picks up the pot and throws it into the snow to set the colors.

“As this dries, your color is going to become even more magnificent,” Lucille Moore said of the piece, which looks like an old copper vessel swirled with subtle, iridescent rainbows.

When the pots cool, the group heads inside the studio at Pushaw Pond Pottery, where Lucille rinses off the copper pots and sets them aside. Then she scrubs the crackled pots until they shine, washing away a smoky layer of carbon to reveal a white background covered with a dark gray spider’s web of crackles.

“White crackle is how you immortalize your breath,” Lucille Moore said. “We come out here to do this and we’re amazed.”

Inside, the studio is like many others – a potter’s wheel, countless blocks of clay, a fine layer of clay dust here and there, a few kilns and a big sink. The magic takes place outside, in the raku pottery shed, where the Moores and Lucier, their apprentice, transform clay urns, bowls and vases into glistening works of art.

Raku, which means “pleasure” in Japanese, is a quick-fire pottery method that has its roots in the country’s tea ceremony. Jay Hanes, an art professor who teaches a raku class at the University of Maine, said the tradition started about 500 years ago, during a particularly bloody period in Japanese history. A powerful shogun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was looking for a way to bring feuding warlords together at a set of peace talks, and turned to Sen no Rikyu, a Zen monk, for help.

Hideyoshi knew Rikyu was familiar with the practice of “sencha,” an ancient Chinese tea ceremony, and asked him to develop a Japanese style of ceremony for the peace talks. Rikyu asked a tile maker named Chojiro to create a simple set of hand-built tea utensils, so plain that it would inspire humility among the warlords.

Chojiro developed the utensils, including a tea bowl, or “chawan,” using a fast-fire technique similar to one used in Korea for roofing tiles. At the time, the most popular pottery was white porcelain with intricate blue decoration, but the tea sets were more organic in form. The Japanese tea ceremony was based on the concept of “wabi,” which Hanes calls “an appreciation of natural permanence and imperfection.

“The original tea bowls were kind of clunky, sort of ugly on purpose,” Hanes said. “To take tea out of this clunky, ugly bowl is an act of humility, and out of humility we can begin peace talks. It’s a really beautiful thing.”

The Moores’ version of raku is anything but ugly.

They don’t create tea sets, as there isn’t much demand and the glazes aren’t food-safe. Instead, they use raku glazes and firing techniques on wheel-thrown pots and vases and hand-built accents, such as dolphins, swirly handles or dragons. Their raku work, like many of their contemporaries in the United States, is less tea-centered and more of an artistic technique.

“The art pieces take a lot longer [than mugs or plates] because they’re one of a kind – there’s more to them,” John Moore said.

The Moores also create more “traditional” pottery, such as giftware and tableware in a hand-painted white finish or earthenware with oatmeal, blue or green glazes. But raku is their real passion.

“Mugs are mugs. There’s no expression in a mug,” said John Moore, who works the wheel and the kiln. “When we relax, we make pots.”

His wife, who does the design work and sculpting, along with most of the painting, agreed.

“We live every day to get our work done to do something like this,” Lucille Moore said. “Three hours, four hours go by and you have no clue.”

They are a little biased, however, in their love for raku. It was, after all, a raku pot that brought the two of them together in the first place. John, who grew up in Salem, N.H., and Lucille, who grew up in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, met in 1993 while working for a potter in Maine. One day, John Moore asked Lucille to come outside and see a new pot he had made. She was so excited about it that he offered to teach her how to do raku. The rest, of course, is history.

“If it weren’t for that raku pot….” Lucille Moore said, laughing.

John Moore’s pottery wasn’t always so impressive, though.

“The first piece I made for my mother was a mug. I brought it home and she said, ‘what is it?'” he said. “When I got started in high school, I figured I’d just make an ashtray and get an easy credit. Fortunately, the art teacher there was a master potter.”

After working in construction for years, John Moore returned to his early love of pottery in 1990. He took classes at the University of Maine’s Hilltop Crafts Center, which is no longer in existence, to hone his technique. In 1993, he started dabbling in raku.

“I saw another potter doing it and just fell in love with it,” he said.

Since then, he and Lucille have worked to hone the technique, which is elusive and inexact.

“We were getting good results, but not how we wanted it,” John Moore said. “Once you’ve made one of these that’s really outstanding, you want to achieve that all the time.”

It took about seven years for them to master the intricacies of the copper glaze, and many pieces ended up in the “wiener machine,” an old hot dog cart that they keep their seconds in until their August “yard sale.” But every “good” piece made up for all the castoffs.

“Sometimes you can do this all day, and if you get just one pot, it’s worth it,” John Moore said.

Pushaw Pond Pottery is located on Pierce Road, off Route 43 in Hudson, and can be reached at 327-1604.