Crystalline Ceramics

Crystalline glazes are one of the most difficult and challenging glazes to produce. This is because they are unusually difficult and time-consuming to formulate and fire. They require meticulous attention to every detail.

I fire one-of-a-kind porcelain pieces to over 2350 °F in the kiln, quickly dropping the temperature several hundred degrees to the range where crystals will grow.  The crystals form in the glaze in a chemical reaction during cooling and grow from small nuclei created during the melting process when silica and zinc come together to form zinc-silicate. 

Each glaze composition, together with the firing and cooling schedule, and glaze thickness, makes different forms and colors of crystals.