Dunting kintsugi experiment
A bad batch of clay led several folks in my salt and soda firing class to have cracking issues with clay, called dunting. It can be painful to invest so much time into a piece, have so much hope for how it will look once fired, and then have your pot crack in the kiln. And I don’t mean a simple small crack, with dunting the pot literally tears itself apart over a period of a few weeks. The dunting god hit one of my pots, it started slowly cracking as we unloaded it from the kiln. From a geek perspective, it was interesting to watch. My pot ended up in 16 pieces! I decided to try a Japanese technique called kintsugi on the pieces. Kintsugi is the process of repairing a pot by highlighting the broken breaks with seams of gold. It is a way of preserving the memories of the pot, and in wabi sabi fashion, embracing its brokenness. I spent some time googling DIY kintsugi, and decided on using gold colored mica and E6000 glue. Real kintsugi costs tons of $$ and is a hard proc...