In 1990 I saw in Toronto’s Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art their collection of early South and Central American ceramics by indigenous peoples. Inspired by those works, I made some bird and bug sculptures (thrown forms altered). On a couple of them I added ‘stirrup handles’ as some of the museum figures had. Most were burnished to a high sheen, then carbon-fired, unglazed, in saggars.
A saggar is a lidded container, which can be packed with organic material (straw, grass, sawdust, even paper) around the clay pieces. When the saggar is heated in a kiln, the organics, deprived of oxygen, imbue the clay with carbon, turning it black.
(Note, the loon, message bird, dollar bird and rocking bird were made later and not in the exhibition. They were experiments with painted slip which didn’t work.)