guild diaries: behind the scenes

behind the scenes at the clé guild

exploration. process. serendipity, mastery. the clé guild is all of it, a crucible for creativity. yes, it produces the most elevated thin brick around (with new creations and media to come) but for us, it's the opportunity to take our time, think, try, experiment, fail, plunge down rabbit holes, fail, try again, and finally... yes. the guild is a gift. it keeps us honest. makes us better.

join us for a tour behind the scenes of the clé guild with eric vandermolen, as he discusses some of his process for creating new collections.

if you prefer text, here is a transcript of the video.

My name is Eric VanderMolen and we are in Richmond, California, at the clé tile guild.

My role at the guild is the guild manager: overseeing production, and developing new surfaces, taking care of glaze chemistry. I studied ceramics early on in college, but then focused on biology and organic chemistry, which doesn’t really apply to ceramics specifically, but more generally having a chemistry background (chemical principles) is really critical in being able to troubleshoot the chemistry of the ceramic glazes, for understanding what’s going on in the molecular level and how that’s affecting the surface of the glazes and the clay/glaze interaction.

When we create glazes for the guild we start by thinking about what the feel of the finished product is going to look like. Rather than a specific surface, we think about the collection and how an individual glaze fits within the collection. In a way, each glaze is like a single, and the collection is like the album. So, one has to be viable on its own, but also within the context of the greater whole.

There’s a lot that happens within the glaze itself, but also the underlying clay which we have to take into consideration, in that the clay really informs how the surface of the glaze ultimately expresses, in terms of the texture. The translucency of the glaze will leave the clay visible and all of that becomes part of the finished story.

The clay body we’re using is a very rugged, minimally processed clay that comes from fairly close by, near Sacramento. It’s a really ancient clay bed. This is being dug, ground and formed into bricks with a little bit of silica grit added, but really not much processing involved. As such, there’s a lot of coarse silica particles, a lot of coarse iron particles, a lot of texture to the clay, which ultimately gives the bricks a lot of character. All of these larger particles and the variation in particle size means you have very, very rugged clay that bonds well with the glaze, but also transfers a lot of its character up through the glaze to the finished surface.

As we’re working on a glaze and developing the different aspects of it, we kind of have to look at each element individually and also zoom out and look at it within the context of the whole. The color of the surface, sheen, the translucency of the clay, the texture of the clay, the texture of the glaze, and each of which takes its own special formula to fix, but none of the variables are necessarily individual. They’re kind of interlocked like a web, so when you tug at one string, it affects all the others, so it becomes a real balancing act to get everything to the right place, still stay balanced within the individual layers, and then also stay balanced within the collection.

One of the really unique things about ceramics in general is that it’s one of the few media that takes materials that are unaltered. There’s no intermediate product. Everything that we’re using from the clay of the tile itself to the materials and the glazes are mined directly from the earth. And we’re combining them, and putting them into the kiln, and it’s an entirely transformative process. Everything that goes in is chemically altered so that our finished product really bears no resemblance at all to what we started with. Likewise, there isn’t any refinement of our materials between their raw state and when we use them. So one of the issues that comes up a lot is drift in materials as they are mined. The natural materials change just as marble cut from a quarry is going to more veined and less veined. The chemical composition of our starting materials changes from time to time, so we’re constantly correcting the steering, essentially, to keep them on track.

I started working with clay almost 30 years ago and I’ve been involved with it most of my life. From production potter to artist in residence to guild manager at clé tile. I’ve dabbled in a lot of different aspects of ceramic production and having a variety of viewpoints has allowed me to be able to explore a little bit more broadly in what we can do in the Guild.