Studio Pottery of Dave Gordon based in Kansas City, Mo

After more years than I'd like to admit, I finally updated this website. Sadly enough I don't have any new pottery finished added to the site. I have recently unpacked my pottery equipment and hoping to start producing small batches of pottery again. Since this is more of a passion than a full time job my time devoted to pottery is limited.

My goal of this new revision of this website is a simply one. Even though I may not have time to quickly finish the pottery that I make. I wanted an easy way to keep those who are interested in my pottery to be able to quickly see what I've been working on.

After unpacking my pottery equipment I had to get back into the rhythm of working on the wheel again. I made a dozen or so bowls to help get back into the swing of things. These bowls were also used as test pieces while I try to find some new glaze recipes I like for this clay body.

Then I decided to start practicing 'pulling handles' for mugs and etc. Handles are within themselves art on the vessel they are attached to and I find them rather difficult. So I decided to start making mugs. I spent the last few weeks of fall making a few mugs a night to practice pulling and attaching handles until it got to cold to work in my garage.

Since I do not have a kiln of my own, I have to pack up my pottery and take it somewhere to get fired. Which I simply haven't had the time to do just that. Although I will scrap and reclaim the clay of most of the mugs shown in the picture. I do plan on finishing a dozen or so of these mugs this spring.

Since I mix all of my glazes I have to spend time mixing and trying out new recipes. This can be a real time consuming process, with a lot of trial and error. I'll spare you with the details of the formulating a glaze.

In general there are three firing temperatures often used and spoken about in the ceramic community; Low, Mid, and High. The melting point of a glaze is dependent to how it was formulated.

The whole point of going into these details is to explain why I don't currently have any glaze recipes. The clay body I am currently using is a mid fire clay. Most of the pottery currently on this website is Raku, which is low fire. On a side note: The majority of 'American' fired Raku pottery have high levels of metal oxides and are not safe to eat or drink out of. Then the few mugs and bowls currently on the website are high fire.

I'm wanting to find a nice variegated blue glaze in this fire range that is similar to the blue mug currently shown on the pottery page. Although I really like the glaze results of this bowl. I accidentally added to much water in the glaze batch and the oxides were not staying suspended evenly giving this unexpected coloring.

Here is a picture of 100+ bowls I made over a weekend in 2006. Then in the following weeks I found out that the public studio where I had planned on glaze firing the bowls was not going to be reliable. So, they have been boxed up waiting to be glazed and fired.