Issue 14 · Materials and Firing
Three ceramicists on electric firing, glaze testing and small-batch production
Published 12 March · Words and studio visits by the editorial desk
Nobody in this piece chose an electric kiln because they preferred it. Gas installations in Cape Town run into serious money and long municipal paperwork, and most studio leases here are short enough that nobody wants to sink a flue into a building they might lose in eighteen months. So the kiln in the corner is electric, usually secondhand, and shared between three or four people who have worked out a rota that survives load shedding and deadline weeks.
We spent time with makers in Woodstock, Salt River and Observatory. All three keep a single notebook for firings: ramp rates, soak times, which shelf, which glaze batch, what came out cracked. It is not romantic record-keeping. It is the only way to know whether a failure came from the clay body, the glaze recipe or the fact that someone opened the lid four hours early.
The shared kiln changes how people work. You cannot fire one mug because you feel like it. You fill a shelf, you wait for two other people to fill theirs, and you accept that a glaze test might sit for a week before it goes in. That delay pushes makers toward small-batch production rather than one-off pieces, and it explains why so much of what sells at local markets comes in sets of four or six.
Market stall fees and material costs came up in every conversation, and nobody dressed them up. The honest version is that a bowl carries the cost of the clay, a share of the glaze, a share of the firing, and a percentage of everything that cracked in the same load. Pricing without that last part is how a studio quietly stops making money.
Read the companion piece on timber sourcing and workshop jigs in Inside a Johannesburg Furniture Workshop, or browse the full archive on the posts page.
About the author
Ceramics and materials editor, Renzorodriguez
Naledi has spent the last nine years reporting on how small studios actually work, not how they present themselves online. She trained in fine art at Michaelis, then spent four years throwing and glazing in a shared Woodstock studio before moving into editorial work full time. That background shapes how she interviews: she asks about kiln schedules, clay shrinkage and the cost of a failed firing before she asks about influences.
For this piece on Cape Town ceramics without a gas kiln, she spent three weeks between Woodstock, Salt River and Observatory, sitting in on glaze tests, reading shared firing notebooks and pricing mugs alongside the makers who sell them at the Biscuit Mill and the Oranjezicht market.