Shell Wadding: A Slippery Story
The Victorian philosopher George Henry Lewes sternly warns us that: “We must never assume that which is incapable of proof”.
I must admit when I was asked by the Goldmark (goldmarkart.com) gallery to write a piece on the use of seashells as wadding I had forgotten the philosopher’s admonition. I assumed it was an ancient Japanese technique and something to do with the tea ceremony.
In Europe, where surface clays are predominantly earthenware, potters did not encounter the problem of pots becoming glued to kiln furniture, or one another, by wood ash combining with the clay body to form glaze1. In South China, Korea and Japan, kilns were fired higher to mature the more refractory surface clays2. The fly ash glazes produced some aesthetically stunning results but also the need to find methods to separate the pots after the firing. Many examples of whole pots from Japan’s six ancient kilns show fragment of other pots attached but by the Momoyama period a number of methods such as stilts, wads and spurs in Mino and Seto and rice straw, high in silica, in Bizen, were in use.
In the West and Australasia the technique of using seashells as wadding was introduced by potters like Randy Johnston and Chester Nealie who had learnt of the technique when studying in Japan in the 1970s. Many in the wood firing community believed, like me, that the use of