a tale of tile - pt.3
It’s been a while since I last wrote about the handmade tiles, but in these next installments of the ‘tales of tiles’ posts there are some exciting updates as now we have the finished products in hand.
If you’re just catching up, you can read here in part 1 about the inspiration I took from an ancient Etruscan vase from this part of Italy, made a pattern, and decided on the material to be used. Then here in part 2, how the pattern was simplified and made into a 3D form that the ceramist could work with, before dropping everything off at the forno (oven) to wait for them to be made and fired.
All of that was back in December when we were heading into the stricter lockdowns over the holidays. And, unfortunately, our area has continued to remain in lockdown ever since, so January was also a bit slower with the progress. But during that time the final wooden mold was made and a test run was complete with some samples in the oven.
The forno factory is a large warehouse just next to a natural hill of Umbrian clay. It’s been the same family working at this spot for generations and he told us that this natural mound (around 20 meters high) of deposited clay (perhaps from when the rivers and waters moved and dried up from this area…as this entire area used to be completely underwater millennia ago) began to be used around the 1200s and at that time it was over 25 kilometers long. Now there is just about 50 meters left and it is right outside the factory windows.
They quarry, in a way, this raw clay, and with earth-movers bring it the short distance into the warehouse where they spread it out onto the floor to dry. These floors are heated to 40 celsius (which along with the large kiln makes for a cozy place to work in the winters) which helps to dry out the clay. Then it’s moved again just out back to where there is a grinding mill which pulverizes the clay to a fine powder and removes any impurities. This then is brought back in to be added to water to create workable batch sizes for them when they use the simple molds and create tiles. Besides the little trucks to help move the loads of clay around, as well as the kiln, everything else here is done completely by hand. It’s such a pure craft and so easy to imagine the same process going on for thousands of years here in the same place.
They’d showed us around a bit when we first came to ask about firing the votiva I’d made, and then for this process during the tile-making they explained even more to us each time as they could tell we’d really taken an interest. The main artisan that we’ve been working closely with told us that they normally don’t do such detailed, bespoke projects (which are on a super small scale) but that we “were really nice people”, seemed interested, and he liked the idea behind the project!
He even told us that we could come over if we ever wanted to try it out on our own.
…which I must say, I’m tempted to do sometime. We’ll see.
Back in January he’d sent us photos of the wooden mold he constructed to scale, then a video of them making the first few samples. I was so excited to get these small updates and it made me look forward to when we’d see the final products…
to be continued…