Elm, Amsterdam Oost, 2023 (I)

The glaze comes from a single elm felled by the city in Amsterdam Oost in the autumn of 2023. Prieto collected the ash herself, washed it three times, and worked from it for the next fourteen months.

Species determines almost everything. Elm carries a high calcium load and gives a glaze that moves early and keeps moving, which is why this vessel needed six firings rather than the four a beech glaze would have taken. Each firing melts the glaze further. At a certain point it begins to run, and it collects at the base in a thick pooled foot roughly eleven millimetres deep.

Prieto stops when the pooling reaches a depth she likes and the piece has not yet fused to the kiln shelf. About a third of them do fuse and are lost.

Thrown in three sections and joined.