Clay And Glazes

Porcelain Project

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Starting in January of 2024 I decided I waned to find a clay body that I enjoyed working with that was suitable for throwing, fired to a bright and even white, and was able to be fired to cone 10 reduction in our university ceramics lab. The most important quality for me was the bright white tone of the clay, with wanting to use more surface decoration in my work being able to have a solid foundation under my underglaze was what I was after.

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My project started with finding recipes, this started with Glazy, USC Ceramics Compendium, DigitalFire and a multitude of other online ceramics resource. While I knew that I was after a white clay body I was unsure of the type, earthenware, stoneware, or porcelain so I started with two white stoneware and four porcelain recipes. 

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The white stoneware was quickly vetoed for not being white in our cone 10 reduction firings and many of the porcelains were turning out gray but there was one that I had more hope for than the others so I chose my recipe and started to tweak it to fit my needs even better.

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The chosen clay body was Gunnar Rasmussen's Porcelain, a recipe found on Glazy. Although this clay body was still turning out more on the gray-blue side in cone 10R. My solution to this was New Zealand Kaolin to replace the grolleg in the recipe, although grolleg is standard in many porcelain recipes NZK fires much whiter. 

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I started tweaking the recipe with just a one to one substitute of the two ingredients which led to a very dry and chalky finished clay body, it was losing the glassiness of porcelain. After more tweaking to the recipe, adding and changing the fluxes and feldspars to cause the clay to melt more I finally got a result I was happy with and that worked well with our current university lab glazes.