Mark Tigges

Specialties

Wood fired pottery.

Meet the Business Owner

Mark T.

Business Owner

I live in Maple Ridge British Columbia now. I ran a small studio in North Vancouver, selling cone 6 ash glazed pots at local farmers and craft markets. We moved because I decided I wanted to fire with wood. It’s difficult to explain about wood fired pots, there is an intangible romance. The difference is essentially that there is control of the atmosphere; with electricity, you have only raw heat and the ambient atmosphere. When you burn something, you have many more variables to control. When you burn wood, you add ash, and ash can itself alone glaze the pots. The beauty of a wood fired pot is on the surface, the pot has a story to tell on how the flame marked it, where it carried ash on to the surface, how the flame licked around it, and how the smoke darkened it.

My kiln is a so-​called manabigama. The name is an invented word stemming from the Japanese words for ‘beautiful’ and ‘kiln’. It’s a modern interpretation of an anagama, which is a kiln built as a tube up the side of a hill