Fire and Salt on the Schwäbische Alb

In the spring of 2022 I spent six weeks with potter Susanne Lukács-Ringel in Southern Germany. Below is an account of my time there.

I arrive in Baden-Württemberg, the southeastern-most state of Germany in March. In the previous days a Sahara sand storm has blown through the country and as we stop off to buy groceries on the way from the airport, I notice the vehicles in the car park are coated in desert dust. It is strange to think that the same components of this dust: silica, clay minerals and iron oxides, are what I will dedicate the next six weeks to exploring as a pottery assistant to Susanne Lukacs-Ringel in the village of Mörsingen.

Some years previously I had met Susanne in the UK whilst volunteering at Art in Clay Hatfield. There’s a tenderness and warmth that emanates from her delicate functional vessels, and I was keen to learn more about the wood and salt-firing methods she uses. I kept in touch and am delighted when, post-pandemic, the opportunity to travel arrives.

Here on the Schwäbische Alb, a high limestone plateau, the wind is bitingly cold in mid-March despite the sun. Nestled behind the pastel pink church at the highest point of the village, Susanne’s home sits amongst gently undulating hills of patchwork farmland, bordered by deciduous forest. Her showroom, workshop, wood stacks and kilns are spread out between a series of wooden barns and outbuildings. Standing guard around the perimeter are ceramic dogs, polar bears and foxes by her daughter, Devon-based artist Marieke Ringel.

We spend the first couple of weeks preparing for Susanne’s first salt firing of the year. The fast-fire kiln is part of a two chambered fusion kiln, built with Fred Olsen in 2005. By blocking off the flues from the attaching groundhog chamber, it can be fired in a day. Most of the kiln will be filled with porcelain dipped in Susanne’s signature cobalt kaolin wash, not a glaze in itself but glassy when combined with the volatilized salt. Dotted on each shelf all around the pots will be tiny dishes filled with salt, already high fired, a technique which Susanne encountered in La Bourne. My first task is to produce as many of these stoneware salt dishes as possible.

On April the second it’s time to fire. During the night while the kiln has been preheating with gas, a thick blanket of snow has fallen, softening the yard like a carpet of ceramic fibre. Reinhard, Susanne’s brother-in-law joins us and we begin from around 7am, stoking metre-long softwood at first into one firebox to 650C and then alternating between the two.

Drawing out test rings indicates that we have a strong reduction, a positive sign. Later in the evening more salt is introduced, pinned in paper bags to wooden planks, adding to a total of almost 6kg. Fuelled by Schwäbisch kartoffelsalat, wurst and pineapple swiss roll, the firing continues until cone 13 is halfway down, by which time it is almost 9pm.

The snow doesn’t last long and by the next day has thawed in the garden, the shade from the forests leaving a white shoreline on the edges of the fields. Unpacking a few days later we’re delighted. The cobalt on Susanne’s carved surfaces morphs from cornflower blue to a deep matte turquoise. The celadons inside are vibrant and glossy. Success.

The next weeks are spent preparing for the big double chamber firing, the first time in three years this anagama style wood kiln had been fired. Family, friends and visitors arrive and the house is transformed into a hive of activity. We begin the firing on the evening of April 14th, toasting the kiln with Irish whiskey; the kiln gods approve with a firework display of lightning and rattling thunder. A small bonfire of criss-crossed hardwood logs on the ground outside the firebox slowly preheats the chamber and over the next 24 hours the pyrometer steadily climbs to 300C.

The following weekend is a blur of hot afternoons and clear, cold nights as I work the graveyard and later afternoon shifts with potter and paediatrician Emy. By the small hours of Saturday morning, we have the job of holding the kiln at 600C for an hour before starting to stoke through the door, introducing a mixture of softwood and hardwood to raise the temperature quickly. At noon Monday the cones are all down at the front and the decision is made to shut off the groundhog after two final cycles of heavy reduction. In one last sooty effort, Susanne and daughter-in-law Kasha push the salt chamber to cone 13, bringing to a close the 96 hour-long endeavour.

Despite some overfiring on the front stack, there is an abundance of real gems. The shinos are rich with surfaces varying from toasty ochres to deep, velvety purples and some shimmering like fish scales. On the porcelain, Turner-esque flashes of salmon pink show traces of the flame’s path, and crystal growths dust the surfaces like snowflakes. Susanne’s work draws from the deep tradition of salt-glazed pottery in Germany, fusing technology developed in her home country with the aesthetics of the east, and she does it masterfully.

You could be forgiven for thinking that all the inhabitants of the little village of Mörsingen are wood firing potters. Wood is so central to life here that stacks of it can be seen outside every house. On my return home the entry terminal at Stuttgart Airport is an unequivocal reminder of this. Travellers are greeted by a forest of geometric dendriforms, steel tubes in the shapes of trees, their metallic branches extending upwards to support the slanting roof. I too feel new offshoots sprouting after my experience here. Who knows yet what fruit they will yield.

Website:

Susanne Lukács-Ringel https://www.holzbrandkeramik.de