Given the huge amount of raw hard labour which goes into firing a kiln, especially a wood-fired kiln, and even more so with larger (more traditional) kilns, it’s not surprising to me that ‘kiln-gods’ exist.

The tradition of wood-firing ceramics is long, and covers a bewildering array of geographies, cultures and belief systems. Many of these cultures, more specifically the families whose livelihoods depended on good results, developed rituals believed to bring good luck to the firing: Blessing the kiln, placing offerings upon it, reciting incantations, and making ‘transitional-objects’ or gods of all kinds and sizes to ward off misfortune and malevolent spirits. Of course, many of these kiln-gods were made of the very material they were made to protect; clay (some raw, others fired). Offerings of flowers, food, and drink (alcoholic of course!) were, and still are, presented in prized examples of pottery.

With so many variables at play, in the wood-firing alone (not to mention the dozens of previous steps), I can see the psychological need to place faith, responsibility even, in something else outside of the whole precarious affair. To avoid the crippling self-doubt of this next set of ‘failures’… This said, I do wince a little when I see contemporary British potters, who have very little genuine connection with Japan, acting out ancient Japanese rituals. - Maybe that’s just the atheist in me.

Even an atheist likes to tell a story though, and around sixteen years ago I told my parents about kiln-gods when they were making small plates and bowls of their own. They are not potters themselves but they had recently made a trip to Japan and returned with happy memories of the food, and good intentions of re-making some of the recipes they’d enjoyed. While I had been puzzling over what birthday gift my parents might like (they already own everything they need, and surely everything they want too), it struck me that I could teach them to throw pots. An experience is always better than an object and, if we fired and glazed the work, they could have both, I thought.

Of course much Japanese food is traditionally served on flat platters and groups of small bowls both of which are conveniently achievable for a beginner. And so we spent a week or so throwing and turning small dishes, and slumping slab plates, before decorating them all in a series of blue and white stoneware glazes and oxides.

Just before we closed the kiln to bisque fire their work, and having just been told about kiln-gods, Mum pinched this little dove from the white stoneware clay they had been using. Quite honestly it blindsided me, at the time and now, that she could so effortlessly, almost unthinkingly, make such a pure little effigy, alive and dynamic. - Of course I fired it, and have kept it since.

How fitting, a dove, the symbol of peace, and hope, and new beginnings. Even for a non-believing Englishman, it seems comforting to have her sit atop my new micro wood-kiln for its maiden voyage. Thanks, Mum.