Flint = Silica (+more)
Cromer is like the Flint capital of the universe, with the entire ‘beach’ beneath the cliffs around the town and the pier (except at very low tide) made up of large flints ranging from the size of a melon to the size of a tangerine (why are sizes always measured in fruit?!). When I arrived, at about 07.00hrs, the water was still as a mirror; mercurial and silken.
My late Grandmother honeymooned with her sweetheart, my Grandad, in Cromer in their blissful youth, and they were beautifully, poignantly laid to rest together when their ashes were scattered in these same waters. It felt good to be here, and to be embarking on this project all about their Norfolk, and mine.
Enroute to Cromer, while driving north from Happisburgh, I was reminded just how synonymous flint is with of the Norfolk landscape. It is at the very heart of the building vernacular of this part of the world and in many, many villages virtually every building is fashioned from it.
Often, as in these images (above) the flints were carefully selected for size but not cut, showing instead that blueish-white pitted, powdery grey surface as though a more organised version of Cromer beach had been commanded to stand tall.
In many of the 650 of Norfolk’s churches, however, the flint is split to reveal the glossy dark brooding glass of their interior. I stopped to take these images (below), in Mundesley. They show that thin shards of flint, the knapped shavings and splinters, are sometimes inserted between these oval ‘bricks’. In other sections of the same building, the craftsmen seem to defied all possibility by cutting the globulous flints into perfect, near geometric blocks. At times these are so finely hune that there is barely mortar between them:
And flint, of course, for a Potter is a key ingredient in both clay and glazes. These days, even if the label on the bag says ‘Flint’ or ‘Quartz’ you are really just buying Silica (SiO2 or Silicon Dixoide). Anonymous, faceless, clinical, refined and homogenised like to many other powders in bags, and this is in part the motivation for this project: To work with materials with provenance, a story, a history, and therefore with value above and beyond their chemical properties.
With any luck, as the project progresses, we will manage to meet some Norfolk flint workers passing on their craft, who can tell us more about this beautiful material and about their relationship with our county.
A next logical step is to ‘Calcine’ some of the flints I have gathered at around 1000°C (this helps to break down the otherwise strong bonds in the material), before grinding them down for use in the clays and glazes I develop. - For that I will need to make a ball-mill. And so the project grows…
