If you’ve ever
loaded a kiln of work glazes on all sides, or if you’ve worked in a clay
classroom with small children and have been concerned about the glaze on their
work running and sticking to kiln shelves, chances are you’ve used kiln
supports produced by us here in Philadelphia. That’s right, The Ceramic Shop is
more than just a supplier of your favorite studio and classroom supplies – we
also have a full production set-up where we make a wide variety of kiln
supports, furniture, and posts under the Roselli name. The Ceramic Shop acquired
the company in 2006, and ever since then we’ve been producing stilts of all shapes and sizes.
One thing that
I’ve always loved about ceramics is how anything that makes it through a firing
is rendered permanent – that means that the work that you put in there, as well
as the stilts or furniture that you might use to support it, both have the same
chance of existing somewhere in the archaeological record down the line. Of course, the history and
permanence of the material is something that gets a lot of mention in
ceramics-focused art curricula; it’s often the nice stuff that students and
artists get to see, though. The stilts
and the furniture survive over time, too, and even though looking at that
might not pack quite the punch of, say, taking in some amazing Greek vases, it
still tells us a lot about how ceramics have been made over time. I love working for a place that contributes to this side of the ceramic record -- largely unseen to many but absolutely necessary.
Last summer, I
took a trip just outside of Rome, Italy. The town of Arezzo was a beautiful
little place that was largely built up in medieval times, but it had been
established much, much earlier – it had actually been the production center of
fancy glazed tablewares in Roman days, so business there had been established
in roughly the 1st century BCE -- over 2,000 years ago. There,
archaeological excavations (that took place in the parking lot of a church,
nonetheless!) uncovered a large-scale production studio, and you can check out
all of the goodies they dug up in the town’s museum.
Much of the
museum was filled with awesome, detailed press-molds that had been used to make
fancy bowls and plates:
The small press molds on the top shelf were made for handle additions;
the bowl forms on the bottom made fancy, red-glossed tablewares.
However, a lot of
the archaeological remains they found in excavations were pieces of kiln
furniture – primarily, wheel-thrown donut-like spacers to separate glazed wares
in a kiln, and stilts, very much like the ones produced by The Ceramic Shop
today. Imagine my surprise when I looked into a display case and saw a
2,000-year-old version of a stilt we make. Here’s a picture:
Ancient tri-point stilts
Compare this to our
own double-pointed stilts – it’s amazing how the design of this piece of
furniture has not functionally changed in over two millennia! Here are a couple
images of the stilts that we produce:
Stilts by Roselli. Unintentionally SUPER retro.
Seeing two
objects made so far apart, in both time and distance, served as a very solid
reminder as to just how permanent the ceramics process is.
The production
studio for our modern stilts can be seen in our North Philadelphia showroom; if
you’ve stopped by and never had the chance to check it out, just ask one of the
employees the next time you’re in and we’ll be glad to give you a peek at
production. It’s kind of cool to think that you can see a process that has been
unchanged in so many ways over such a long time! Hope you enjoyed the history
lesson, and I’ll leave you with one final image from my trip – a display of
ancient potter’s tools, mainly made of copper, ivory, and bone.
