Woodfired Porcelain: An Adventure in Clay, Fire, and Fine Dining

An Adventure with an Uncertain Outcome

Stoneware and woodfiring have been part of my daily life for years – robust, full of character, reliable. With porcelain I am far less familiar. The project I am writing about here exists only in my head so far. I don’t know whether it will succeed or fail. Nor do I know whether I will be able to keep my self-imposed deadline in spring 2025. I sense that many things can go wrong: from the raw materials to the preparation and finally to the firing. And that is precisely what makes it exciting. This blog is meant to accompany the journey – an adventure in which setbacks are part of the process. In the end, the result could be a tableware that does not yet exist: woodfired porcelain, intended for fine dining and for people who appreciate this kind of aesthetic.

Looking Back: From the GDR to Industry – and Back Again

In GDR times it was normal to prepare clay yourself. Ready-made clay bodies were hardly available, so almost every workshop had its own solutions and machines. After reunification, the prevailing opinion was: “It doesn’t pay off – industry can do it cheaper and more efficiently.” Economically that was true, but for me the quality was a disappointment. The West German “bagged clay” was so unplastic, so difficult to throw, that at times I wondered whether I had forgotten how to work on the wheel. Only when I returned to preparing my own clay did it feel like coming home. Willi Singleton, an American colleague, once described this development aptly: for him, industrially produced clay is the ceramic equivalent of supermarket toast bread – convenient, but without character. He himself prefers to use “wild” clay directly from nature, despite all the difficulties it brings in processing. [In my blog I have published his essay on this → Food, Clay and Play].

About twenty years ago I began to move away from standard recipes, obtained analyses from different clay pits and developed my own mixtures using glaze calculation software. It was a long learning process – but one that paid off step by step.

In the end, it always depends on how you calculate.

The Search for the Perfect Kaolin

At some point, I came across a kaolin from Saxony-Anhalt that was so plastic it immediately caught my attention. After several test series, it became the centerpiece of my first woodfired porcelain. This body had special qualities: it was pleasant to throw, reacted vividly to ash deposits in the wood kiln, and even showed a slight translucency at very high temperatures. It was precisely this combination of resistance and elegance that made it unique for me.

But the euphoria didn’t last. A few years later, the quarry was closed and production discontinued. What had once been readily available suddenly vanished—and I had to start all over again. It took three years until I found a kaolin in the Czech Republic with similar properties. Despite countless calculations and experiments, I never managed to reproduce the original body one-to-one.

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2016: First Test Series – What Still Didn’t Work

In 2016, I threw the first test series with the new porcelain body. But the results did not convince me. Almost unconsciously, I had adopted the working methods and appearance of my stoneware products. For porcelain, that was unsuitable. The effort is greater, throwing is more difficult, waste rates are higher—and for that reason, the outcome must be aesthetically more refined.

At least a first step in the right direction was visible: my glazes looked far more brilliant and colorful on porcelain bodies, and the material reacted very variably to ash deposits in the wood kiln. In some parts of the kiln, dramatic color variations appeared from black to red to white – but those were also the places with the highest rejection rate. Nevertheless, I initially put the project on hold. I simply didn’t feel comfortable with the results.

Today I also produce special woodfiring bodies, which I also sell to colleagues – my porcelain body among them. Some workshops, despite the higher cost, prefer my recipes because the industrially available alternatives for this firing range are hardly convincing. They may be cheap, but in effect they are often dull and lifeless.

An Unexpected Turning Point

This year, a situation arose that provided the decisive impulse for my current project. A colleague had ordered woodfired porcelain from me – and later decided not to take the full amount. Suddenly I was faced with the question: what should I do with the remaining material? The obvious solution was simply to process the clay myself. And exactly at this point, the idea of an independent woodfired porcelain tableware emerged. A tableware that does not yet exist: conceived as a high-end product for gastronomy, especially in the fine dining sector, but also for “foodies” who value this aesthetic.

Porcelain has traditionally held a special place in German haute cuisine as “white gold.” It is considered the “royal class” of tableware – flawlessly white, elegant, almost invisible so that the food takes center stage. In practice, in fine dining restaurants this usually means industrially manufactured porcelain, produced with high technical effort and offering perfect uniformity.

But this is precisely where I see the starting point for my project: a porcelain that does not imitate flawless uniformity but instead leaves the traces of handwork visible and carries within it the vitality of fire. Hand-thrown porcelain is extremely rare today – and precisely for that reason it can be an alternative that consciously sets itself apart from industrial sameness. My vision is a tableware that opens an additional aesthetic dimension for chefs as well as guests and makes porcelain tangible again as an individual, artistic material.

My project is therefore an adventure with an open outcome. It may succeed, it may fail – but that is exactly where the appeal lies. Step by step I want to show here on the blog how my new product is being created – until the planned sales launch in spring in my online shop and on my Etsy account (which still has to be set up).

The Question of What Is Truly Handmade

In my view, especially in haute cuisine the crucial question is whether a plate is truly handmade – or merely imitates the look of the handmade. Many industrial manufacturers have now brought “handmade look” series to the market, but they have nothing to do with the vitality and authenticity of genuinely hand-thrown tableware – yet many chefs do not even seem to notice the contradiction.

“It is not a great intellectual leap to see  the inconsistency of putting ’slow food‘ on ‚fast plates‘.”*

*Correspondence with Ben Richardson on 5 October 2014. Ben Richardson lives in Sandford, Tasmania, and runs Ridgeline Pottery. Richardson gave a talk at the 2nd European Woodfiring Conference at Guldagergaard on his tableware commissions. – Taken from Mary Ann’s article on the Slow Life: she describes how chefs and potters around the world celebrate the bespoke and the genuine – an attitude that goes far beyond marketing and leads to a more mindful, slower way of life → [Reversing the Trend: A Celebration of the Slow Life].

Over the last few years, however, my impression has been that industry has appropriated this trend – perhaps this thought simply does not fit into our society as it has developed? Does everything really always have to “add up” in such a short-sighted way?

As Mary Ann writes in her article, the philosopher and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy pointed this out decades ago:

Instead of consuming mass amounts of factory-produced suits, furniture or ceramics that add no joy or beauty to our lives but keep us tied to jobs we detest in order to make the money to feed our lives with objects of no value or meaning, Coomaraswamy believed that purchasing one well made suit, table, or ceramic object, would help to stop this endless cycle.

The special, the handmade, is passed down with pride. And in the end: less is more – a thought one can celebrate when living the “Slow Life.”