Chemistry teacher Catherine Burchat: ceramics

When and how did you start doing ceramics?

“I started doing it when I was finished at college…I was looking for something to occupy myself, and I’ve always had a creative side. So I started taking lessons and just loved it.”

Do your pieces come in handy as gifts?

“Yes, they do. [Some teachers] have some. When we do our yankee swap and at Christmas, I usually bring in a piece.”

Do you prefer to create manually or with the spinning ceramics wheel?

“I don’t do a whole lot on the wheel. I do it occasionally but most of it is hand-building.”

What is your favorite ceramic technique?

 “One of the techniques I really love is called raku…it roughly translates [into English from Japanese] to ‘dancing with fire.’ It is a technique where you take your pieces and you form them, and you fire them one time... Then we use an outdoor kiln where we put the pieces in the kiln, which is just the oven used to heat them. You heat it up to 1200 to 1400 degrees; [the pieces are] glowing red hot!…We open up the kiln, with these long tongs and all dressed up in protective clothing, we grab these pieces out while they are still glowing red hot and take them over to a metal garbage can that has been filled with something that will burn…and you put them gently in this big barrel…and then you put the lid on and it smokes and takes all the oxygen out of the barrel so it does interesting things to the glazes, and oftentimes you get beautiful metallic sheens and cool effects from it and it turns anything that wasn’t glazed a nice black color.”