Ephraim Faience Pottery, Inside a Modern Pottery Studio
Spring 2002
by John Finlayson, board member


I never win anything. Well, almost never. In December, my wife Beth and I attended the annual holiday get-together for Ephraim Faience Pottery (EFP) at Dovetail Antiques in Deerfield, Wisconsin. Among the many events that day was a drawing for a chance to tour the pottery to see their artwork being created. This is something that normally just does not usually happen, as the pace of pottery making does not welcome interruption. Amazingly, Beth and I won a tour!

In mid January, we and two other winning couples met John Matthews, the owner of Dovetail Antiques, and we set out on a meandering drive through rural Wisconsin to the studio. There we were met by EFP owner Kevin Hicks and his staff, who showed us around on a Saturday, normally their day off.

When it comes to pottery, the base element is, of course, clay. Not just any handful of mud will do. Written histories of the famous potteries of yesteryear tell how the business was located at a particular site because of the quality of the local clay; or that a potter prospered when he discovered a deposit of perfect clay along a creek in a farm field. The business doesn't work that way anymore. National companies such as U.S. Clay (a Minnesota company) mines, blends and de-airs the clay to order-freeing potteries to concentrate on making pots. De-airing is the process of driving air bubbles out of the clay to avoid surface blemishes or worse-pots exploding in the kiln.

The pots themselves can be made in two ways: by throwing them on a wheel or by the slip cast method. Throwing pots, which is what EFP does, involves first centering the clay on a wheel. As it rotates, the potter guides the shape and creates the cavity by hand. Decoration occurs when clay is added to the surface (to create, say, flowers or small animals) or is carved away to create depth. Because they are made by hand, every pot is different from the next, even within the same line.

Slip casting involves machine-forcing semi-solid clay (called "slip") between interior and exterior portions of a segmented mold. Many well known potteries of the past, such as Rookwood and Roseville, used this method. The pots are very uniform as to shape, but as the plaster mold erodes with use, the lines of the design are increasingly less crisp than the first to be cast. EFP uses this method only on tiles and on some small paperweights.

The finished pots must dry completely before they are fired. Otherwise the action of water boiling out of the clay will shatter them. During drying, the pots shrink about 12 percent. Those that dry unevenly can crack or break. The larger the pot, the greater the loss rate. Since clay is cheap, you may wonder why large pots cost so much more than the small ones. It's not just that they are harder to make; it's that fewer survive.

The first firing is called the bisque fire which is at 2,078 degrees farenheit for 22 hours. After a day of cool-down, the pots can be glazed. The glazes are minerals suspended in water and, interestingly, bear no resemblance before firing to what they will look like after firing. There is as much artistic skill in glazing a pot as in throwing and decorating it. Glaze firing takes eight hours at 1,990 degrees. After cooling, the pots are complete unless the design calls for a metallic glaze to be added. If so, the pot is fired again at 1,200 degrees which melts the metal but does not disturb the existing glaze.

Our tour of EFP was fascinating and enjoyable. It gave us both a new appreciation for what it takes to make a pot. Many thanks to the people at Ephraim Faience Pottery!