Demonstration by Linh Khanh at ‘Bonsai by the Harbour’

Last Saturday, I went to ‘Bonsai by the Harbour’. It is an annual event organised by the Bonsai Federation of Australia in a delightful waterfront setting in Gladesville (image above). Most demonstrators throughout the day had my curiosity, but the last demonstration by Linh Khanh got my attention. In a little more than one hour, he used three Procumbent Junipers, five chunks of mallee root and a marble suiban to create a very believable miniature landscape. The composition was held together by the mortar consistency soil mix, which was 90% fine soil and 10% clay. The trees were in need of further shaping and I would have made them a little shorter, but the landscape was auctioned and sold at the reserve price of $400. Anyway, the photos below say it all.

At last! New wood-fired bonsai pots

It has been a whole year since my last wood-firing (http://lomov.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/latest-bonsai-pots.html). At last, it’s come along again and I was ready with a few bonsai pots! Some of them are shown below.



Images above show my favorite pot in this batch. Every side of this pot looks interesting. It is stoneware, wood-fired, yellow rutile glaze, round, 19 × 8 cm.

Images above:
Left – stoneware, wood-fired, yellow rutile glaze, round, 16 × 8.5 cm;
Center – a close up of crystalised glaze on one of the pots;
Right – stoneware, wood-fired, yellow rutile glaze, round, 17 × 7.5 cm.

Images above:
Left – stoneware, wood-fired, blue stoneware glaze, round, 21.5 × 7.5 cm;
Right – stoneware, wood-fired, blue stoneware glaze, round, 17 × 4.5 cm.

Images above:
Left – stoneware, wood-fired, white stoneware glaze, round, 20 × 5 cm;
Right – stoneware, wood-fired, no glaze, round, 15.5 × 4 cm.



Images above:
Left – stoneware, wood-fired, naturally formed ash, round, 16 × 12 cm;
Center – stoneware, wood-fired, naturally formed ash, round, 12.5 × 10.5 cm;
Right – stoneware, wood-fired, yellow rutile glaze, round, 13 × 12 cm.

The pots shown in left and center images above didn't have any glaze, instead they were placed right in front of the fire box in the throat of the kiln. As a result, they were mercilessly beaten by fire, smothered with molten ash and buried in embers. Images below show these two pots before and after firing inside the kiln.     

In case you are wandering what is the throat of a kiln, see images below. All other pots shown in this post were fired in the main chamber of the kiln shown below as well.

P.S. For more info on wood-fired kilns see: http://lomov.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/during-
recent-trip-to-canberra-with.html