"Practise the art," Seamus Heaney exhorts us in his tribute to Norman MacCaig; adding, "Happy the man . . . with a natural gift/for practising the right one from the start." Archie McCall, currently head of the ceramic department at Glasgow School of Art, is one of the happy few I know who never doubted his vocation from the moment he turned his first pot. Since 1990 he and his artist wife, Irena, have been based in Galloway, the rich landscape of which informs all his work. If you were to visit them now at their converted mill-house outside New Abbey, you would find at the top of their extensive walk-round-me garden a strange structure like an elongated igloo, half buried in the ground; this is McCall's new groundhog kiln, a wood-firing kiln that is the first of its kind in Scotland.
Last weekend was the culmination of much labour - the first firing. It was already dark when I arrived a day into proceedings, the air sweet with wood smoke. In roughly 48 hours the kiln burns three tons of pine wood, consuming the wood so voraciously that it must be stoked every ten minutes. A blue tarpaulin covered a group of people in work clothes - the necessary relay of students and friends - who sat in a fierce artificial light, as a warming fire burnt near by.
It appeared like the scene of an excavation or some primitive burial ritual. The mound of the kiln, made from a special refractory concrete, had cracked, and from various vents came haloes of flame or thick black smoke. At dawn, crows flapping off the highest trees were to hit the thermals from its chimney and veer away, astonished.
McCall had first seen a kiln like it when he was in Australia for a three-month residency at Canberra School of Art. The kiln there had been built by Fergus Stewart, who as a 16 year old in Dumfries had attended some of McCall's pottery classes more than 20 years ago. Now that McCall had secured funding, Stewart had returned from Australia to help him build a wood-firing kiln of his own. The original groundhog kiln was designed by the Californian ceramist Fred Olson. His design is travelling round the globe from California to Australia, to Scotland and to Denmark, as potters see its potential.
For McCall, the global spread of the groundhog kiln illustrates an interesting development in ceramics. "In the eighties and nineties, ceramics moved away from kilns being important. The gallery base - where you were showing - became more important than how the work was made. Now potters are once again deciding that kilns are a good draw, a focus for the work."
Apart from the appeal of working and firing with others, the attraction of the kiln for McCall lies in extending his own range and formidable expertise as a potter, particularly with regard to the richness of surface effects possible with a wood-burning kiln. With the modern kiln, results can more or less be guaranteed: with the groundhog kiln there is always calculated risk.
"Potters," he reminds me, "are always interested in serendipitous effects of fire." However, although the kiln may appear a source of elemental - and, to the outsider, almost malevolent - power, by controlling its oxygen intake and its draw, through bricks like organ stops, the potter can control the heat, the flame path and even the colour of the pots. At times, in fact, McCall and Stewart enthuse to me like a couple of chemists, whose talk is leavened with poetry; to the Japanese, Stewart tells me, ash "weeps over the pots".
Stewart lifts a brick from a spy hole and lets me peer into the beautiful heart of the kiln. Flames - orange and watery - wash over the brick floor and the stacked pottery. There are roughly 250 pieces here, and the pyrometer tells us they are being fired at 1,100oF.
After this first firing, McCall will have a huge amount of information about his kiln. Already it looks to have acquired character. His students have nicknamed it "Scorchio" after an item in The Fast Show. In time - ie, funding permitting - Archie and Irena want to cover Scorchio with a cruck frame barn, a traditional farm building unique to the south-west of Scotland and the north of England. It is the melding of the international with the local that makes this project so exciting to those who have visited and revisited its birth.
"Happy the man . . . with a natural gift." Indeed, and even happier the one who can share his early learning and his enthusiasm with others.
