Is it possible to make bone china with synthetic bone ash?

[ATauer]

I’m considering doing a little work in bone china, an escalation of my strata casting with paperclay porcelain so I could have works that still have layers of color but are much more translucent then the porcelain I use for strata casting right now. I would also be interested in building on Angela Mellor’s work with bone china and paperclay, since paperclay is the only reason I’m in ceramics, and I feel that inspired by her work there is lot more to explore with the two together. 

But the suppliers near me only have synthetic bone ash, and I’ve always heard for actual bone china you need the real thing. Which I’m rather hoping isn’t true. As a veterinarian of many years and a former vegetarian, while I realize those bones would just have been used in other ways or disposed of, I just can’t help feeling really really uncomfortable with the idea that my artistic medium is half made of dead animal products. I don’t judge anyone who does, see what I just said about the bones otherwise being either wasted or used for something else, but it just makes me personally uncomfortable. I can also imagine all the people in my life who gave me constant crap for becoming a vegetarian at age 11, and then crap when I was forced by my doctor to start eating meat in my 20s, giving me hell for using bones in my work. 

I haven’t been able to find really any information about why real bones are supposed to be used for bone china, I haven’t found anything scientific that explains it. And it seems to me that the synthetic is literally the exact same substance, just sourced from different things, so the chemistry shouldn’t be any different and it seems to me like synthetic bone ash should work for the clay (well, I rather consider it much like Egyptian paste, more of a glass like material with things in common with clay, which I love because nothing makes me happier than working with material I feel joins my two main mediums of glass and clay). 

Thanks for any clarification or pointing me in the direction of anything that breaks it down. I’m just going off of books on porcelain, some of which are not very recent, just flatly stating it without providing any actual reason. So something that provides context would be very helpful!

[neilestrick]

We don't make any tweaks to glazes when using synthetic, so I don't see why it wouldn't work unless there's a difference in the solubility that affects the plasticity or something like that.

[Callie Beller Diesel]

I do have a colleague that did some work with bone China, and I think the difference is in bucket rheology. I didn’t have a really extensive conversation with her about it. While it might be technically chemically the same on paper, usually when you have a naturally derived material vs a synthetic one, sometimes there are practical differences. She did say it was a massive PITA to work with. 
 

If you’re looking for translucence, you might also consider haloycite based porcelains instead. Polar Ice from Plainsman is one, and I’m sure there are others from US suppliers.  You can get dry bags of them if you want to slip cast. They’re still primadonnas, but still more user friendly than bone China. They tend to be comparatively expensive because halloycite kaolins come from Australia mostly, but they’re  very beautiful. 

[ATauer]

On 7/21/2022 at 11:28 AM, Callie Beller Diesel said:

I do have a colleague that did some work with bone China, and I think the difference is in bucket rheology. I didn’t have a really extensive conversation with her about it. While it might be technically chemically the same on paper, usually when you have a naturally derived material vs a synthetic one, sometimes there are practical differences. She did say it was a massive PITA to work with. 
 

If you’re looking for translucence, you might also consider haloycite based porcelains instead. Polar Ice from Plainsman is one, and I’m sure there are others from US suppliers.  You can get dry bags of them if you want to slip cast. They’re still primadonnas, but still more user friendly than bone China. They tend to be comparatively expensive because halloycite kaolins come from Australia mostly, but they’re  very beautiful. 

Continental Clay had never heard of Halloysite or Super Standard for that matter when I brought up to them if it would be possible to order better quality kaolins other than just Grolleg as a special order! MN Clay Co about 20 minutes in the other direction (I guess a long time ago they were one company but split up, which is interesting because they are both family run so I’d love to learn about what must have been a lot of drama to have a family split apart into two ceramic suppliers in one city, when many people don’t have a supplier anywhere near them!) either had heard of them or just pretended to when I asked and months ago they said they might be able to order one or both of those kaolins with their quarterly chemical shipment from Laguna, and I guess mark up a price for me, but we’ve since had some huge back and forths about how 90% or more of their stonewares and all of their porcelains, even the cone 10 ones, don’t come anywhere near vitrification, which they don’t think is a problem, and they also lied to me telling me the porcelain I panic bought a lot from them because at the time it had been months since anyone had been able to get Grolleg delivered to Minnesota, this porcelain had been out of stock for months, and I was afraid with the Grolleg stuff it might go out of stock again really soon and it was the *only* porcelain in Minnesota that I could potentially handbuild and sculpt with, so they lied and told me it was vitrified at cone 6 (try over 4% absorption!) and that it was translucent, a big requirement for me, but then I learned they put ZERO feldspar in the porcelain which means it literally can’t become translucent. They told me if I wanted several clays I’d bought from them to be vitrified I should buy a bunch of feldspar from them and find out how much I would need to add to get it vitrified at cone 6, and seemed shocked when I told them if I did that, which I shouldn’t have to pay for a bunch of feldspar that should already be in the damn clays, especially the porcelain, that I would also need to use frit to get it actually down to 0.5 % or less at cone 6, because clearly they have no idea how to make clay. So we’ve been arguing about it for months, because they have a no pugged clay return policy, which should be waived when they purposely mislead me about a bunch of things, and tried to tell me it didn’t matter because no one makes functional ware out of porcelain anyway!!! I mean, they own a clay company, they should know vast numbers of functional potters use porcelain and I need mine vitirified and translucent for my sculpting for a variety of reasons. So we are not on good terms and I don’t think they would order Halloysite for me. 

I have looked long and hard for Halloysite to buy to use as my kaolin in my homemade porcelain recipe (the only way I could have a porcelain that actually does everything I need it to do without paying tons of shipping - and I haven’t found a porcelain I’m happy with for sculpting at any places in the US.) To buy Halloysite it has 1) doubled in price from where it was a year ago because of shipping/supply issues and 2) the shipping costs for a 50 lb bag  are 4 times what the expensive bag costs, so I super can’t afford it especially as I would be going through at least one 50 lb bag a month if not more often. It also isn’t really what I’m looking for with the bone china, or if I could get Parian in the US I would also love to use that with my colored clay. The bone china would provide way more translucency and a hard glass like final product that NZ Kaolin clays just don’t have at all to the same degree, if I could get it. It is really basically glass. My ideas for using it with color are very specific and an actual porcelain just would not work - otherwise I would just stick with my porcelain recipe I developed coloring it, which I do, and works great, and I would keep doing things with it, I just couldn’t do what I could do with bone china. 

I get your comment about the chemical content of things maybe being the same from different sources but having different properties, but what is in bones is very simple and as a veterinarian I would say that there is nothing special about bones that provides anything different as far as I can see other than what is in the synthetic, it is not a complicated material. Which is why I really think it should work just fine but all these old porcelain books say you need the real thing for bone china versus using it in glazes, but they are pretty out of date so I’d really like to find something modern that tells me one way or another. If I could use synthetic and make my own slip, it would be pretty darn cheap with such few ingredients and so little Grolleg. I’m looking for some very specific ways of using colored clay with bone china, that as I said no real porcelain no matter how white would work. 1.5 years and I’m living in France and will have all these things at my disposal and I will also get to use Parian for colored clay too which will be amazing, but I’d hate to have to wait that long to use bone china. There really should be a pretty simple place to find out if synthetic is good enough or not, so I don’t understand why I can’t find something like that. I could make a test batch I guess with the synthetic and see how it turns out. I wouldn’t be throwing it or anything so I shouldn’t have the problems your friend had, it would mostly be casted with a small amount of handbuilding, I make Egyptian paste and sculpt it which is supposed to be even less plastic than bone china so I think I could handle it. 

[Min]

7 hours ago, ATauer said:

...or if I could get Parian in the US

Why don't you make up some of that and give it a try?

[ATauer]

4 hours ago, Min said:

Why don't you make up some of that and give it a try?

I’ve been in the hospital almost two months and don’t know when I will be able to walk again and go home. I’m trying to do research and get answers so that when I get home I can just jump into a lot of stuff, including a ton of testing, and anything I can reduce having to just make some up as a trial, when if it doesn’t work I would then have to spend time finding someplace that actually sells real bone ash and order it and wait for the longer than normal shipping times to then do trials with that saves me time and effort and reduces by a lot the amount of testing I have to do. I have to do a lot of work when I get back to work doing extensive testing to get my white stoneware recipe developed, which will take up a lot of time, I have to do a huge amount of new glaze testing, and I have to do a large amount of testing of soluble salts, just off the top of my head. There is also the huge amount of testing I have to do with naked raku slips, glazes, and firing temperatures now that I think of it as well- and somewhere in all this I have to make a huge amount of work, as well as completely rebuild a kiln and finish creating the computer controller for it since I can’t afford to buy one. My to do list for the first month allowed to work is incredibly long, with the assumption that I make at least three 6 ft plus tall sculptures in addition to a bunch of smaller work- I have a month to create enough stock for my online store & that is going to be very hard. Any time I have that is not doing that is doing all these other things. 

That is why I’ve been posting so much, hoping to get answers about naked raku and copper mattes, finding out if I need to find someplace that sells real bone ash and order it now so I’ll be ready, and so on, because definitive answers to any of the questions I have posted would make my post-hospitalization life so much smoother and faster and save mea ton of time, like if I had had my soluble salts questions answered  (which Marcia Selsor never replied to the DM that I was told to send to her to ask her where she buys her soluble salts, and that is getting awfully close to a month since I sent the message without a reply) it would save me a great deal of time and even more money, so I’m just trying to make things easier on future me, unfortunately there just haven’t been many answers to the questions I have posed, perhaps they have been too specific for this kind of forum, but I don’t know where else to ask them, I haven’t found a soluble salts facebook group or anything! That is maybe an idea though, there is probably at least one bone china Facebook group and while I hate it when people who know nothing about an art form join a group and then say they are new to it and could you please answer this very basic question, or worse, explain to me everything you know about how to do this art form- obviously I won’t o that, I know lots about slipcasting and enough about firing bone china and so forth I can likely get started without any real help other than the question of the recipe!

[Min]

I'm getting rather lost trying to follow your posts. In regards to the title of this post there is a member from quite a few years back that posted 2 bone china recipes using tri-calcium phosphate aka synthetic bone ash. One for a casting slip the other for a plastic body. Link below.  There are not a lot of people working with bone china at the studio potter level so finding info is difficult.

 

[PeterH]

On 7/21/2022 at 5:28 PM, Callie Beller Diesel said:

I do have a colleague that did some work with bone China, and I think the difference is in bucket rheology. I didn’t have a really extensive conversation with her about it. While it might be technically chemically the same on paper, usually when you have a naturally derived material vs a synthetic one, sometimes there are practical differences. She did say it was a massive PITA to work with. 

Stumbled across this, which seems to confirm the point, and offer a mitigation of sorts:
to make it into a casting slip add 0.4% Dispex; to attempt a plastic body add 3% bentonite: I have used real bone ash and have not had the smell but I choose synthetic bone ash for it's chemical consistency batch to batch [my emphasis]

 

[Mark C.]

(I refuse to buy anything from Laguna)

(they said they might be able to order one or both of those kaolins with their quarterly chemical shipment from Laguna,)

Many companys buy from Laguna Clay

Well I guess thats not an option for you  so on some other options  

I use tri-calcium phosphate aka synthetic bone ash in a few glaze  recipes  and with great results-I burned thru a 50 # bag in about 5 years but not for slips-it works great for snappy glaze colors

I also use  real bone ash from long ago as well-not sure if its still available .

also if you click on the posters name you can see when they last visited site Marcia  Selsor has not been here since June 7 so not surprized she has not responded although you can turn on email notifcations that you receive an Email-not sure if hers is turned on-you could send it thru her website maybe

[ATauer]

1 hour ago, Mark C. said:

(I refuse to buy anything from Laguna)

(they said they might be able to order one or both of those kaolins with their quarterly chemical shipment from Laguna,)

Many companys buy from Laguna Clay

Well I guess thats not an option for you  so on some other options  

I use tri-calcium phosphate aka synthetic bone ash in a few glaze  recipes  and with great results-I burned thru a 50 # bag in about 5 years but not for slips-it works great for snappy glaze colors

I also use  real bone ash from long ago as well-not sure if its still available .

also if you click on the posters name you can see when they last visited site Marcia  Selsor has not been here since June 7 so not surprized she has not responded although you can turn on email notifcations that you receive an Email-not sure if hers is turned on-you could send it thru her website maybe

Well the last couple of posts provide me with a good amount of hope that synthetic should work, which matches what I know about the biology of it which I think in this case might even be more important than the chemistry of it. It is no problem at all to get as much of the synthetic as I want locally and for pretty cheap if I recall. I don’t even know where to get the real stuff as no suppliers I have looked at so far carry it. I have a surprisingly large number of glaze recipes where I use synthetic bone ash but using it in glazes versus using it in clays like most materials is completely different. I’m excited about the recipes (I have a number of recipes as well that I might try subbing in the synthetic, if I don’t love these first recipes) and hope sodium silicate will be fine as Dispex is not sold in the US. While it might not be as popular as a lot of other things for studio potters, at least having been very immersed in the porcelain world it seems to me like quite a lot of studio potters use it, but that may be two biases- following the careers of a lot of people in porcelain and the fact that many of them are in Europe, where bone china slip is sold by most of the big name suppliers. From what I have seen, it is decently popular there. Especially if an artists starts slipcasting porcelain it seems like pretty soon it is “well why not slipcast bone china?”. I know of a few major artists who throw on the wheel with it, I don’t know if I will pursue a plastic version, if so it would not be on the wheel (I’ve heard even there it has no plasticity) but handbuilding colored clay & I guess I’d see how much you could do with it. I doubt it would get anywhere near what I can build with regular porcelain that has been stained. That’s were I really wish we had Parian over here, because then I could slipcast in bone china and do handbuilt/sculptural colored clay work in Parian, which is so much more translucent than regular porcelain and of course has the self-glazing going for it/surface texture. It might be possible to mostly build sculptures with regular colored porcelain and add some plastic bone china as accents. It continues to boggle my mind how so many parts of the world just don’t have ceramic things that are so common in the other half of the world, including lots of lower middle income countries that often don’t have a lot of the basics. 

 

 

 

***Continue reading only if you want a mostly detail-free reason for my feelings about Laguna and how and why I try to avoid them, having found out a few months ago about their huge wholesale monopoly inadvertently but doing what I can to avoid having to personally interact or give my money directly to them:

I had a horrible, extremely negative experience with one of Laguna’s clays that I won’t get into but the way the company handled it, their joke of customer service (*one* person who can deal with customer service issues for the whole gigantic LA company who won’t call you back for over 3 weeks, and won’t do the minimum to make things better that every other supplier would do), and their clay techs who make the clay knowing absolutely *nothing*, not even the most basics of basics, of the kind of clay I was using, means I do not want anything to do with their commercial products or to buy from them knowing the hell that would await me if I needed customer service, and a strong aversion to the idea of using their clay after having had horrible experiences with at least two very different clays. I have no control over who buys from their wholesale business and rarely know if a supplier buys from them (I would never have had any idea they had a wholesale business and one of my suppliers buys from them if they hadn’t mentioned it when I asked about ordering some different kaolins somehow) and most of those products are ones they are re-selling so it isn’t stuff they’ve made, I don’t have to deal with them as a company, and I can’t avoid them. C’est la vie, like most monopolies you might try and boycott they are everywhere, hidden, so you can’t really avoid them. I’ve accepted that but I can still avoid what I can control. I will be doing whatever is in my power to avoid their talc especially considering Matt Katz has tried it and says its awful. Sorry to go off topic but you seemed especially to be trying to say something about my refusal to buy from them. 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

Dispex is what they use in the UK instead of Darvan. 

[Mark C.]

Its fine to avoid a company from personal experience-I was just saying that Laguna is going to be hard to avoid as they supply  so many other clay outlets

The cimtalc is not a Laguna product its just another talc from another supplier that Laguna happens to buy from.

I to have had issues myself with Laguna  but have resolved most of them.

As noted  above Darvan will work fine as I used it in a slip business I once owned.

Many products from overseas are not available here but most can be substituted and a few are available 

[ATauer]

11 hours ago, PeterH said:

Stumbled across this, which seems to confirm the point, and offer a mitigation of sorts:
to make it into a casting slip add 0.4% Dispex; to attempt a plastic body add 3% bentonite: I have used real bone ash and have not had the smell but I choose synthetic bone ash for it's chemical consistency batch to batch [my emphasis]

 

Oh funny, one of the recipes comes from the book Contemporary Porcelain by Peter Lane which I was *just* literally reading  in the hospital, I finished it only a very short while ago. I hadn’t had the epiphany yet about stains and bone china, otherwise I would have written those down.  Peter Lane’s book blew my mind, because almost every single porcelain recipe in it had a flocculant in it,  Peter Lane said that every porcelain body benefits from flocculation, it supposedly makes it more plastic and increases green strength. And it came at a time where I was on the fence about using neph sye as my feldspar in my porcelain recipe, based on the literal rants Matt Katz would go on about using it or Minspar in claybodies in the CMW class, but having been seeing a lot of newer porcelain recipes with it, faced with the fact that the only potash feldspar I have access to right now is Custer, and I absolutely couldn’t bear the thought of going through the effort and pain of building a 6 ft sculpture and then having a big iron spot on it from the Custer. Also Tony Hansen has been extensively using neph sye in as many of Plainsman’s midfire bodies as he can as well as a bunch of opensource porcelain c6 casting slips he is working on- he emailed me and called it “The Feldspar of the Gods”. I’ll DM you what I ended up doing. 

[ATauer]

4 hours ago, Callie Beller Diesel said:

Dispex is what they use in the UK instead of Darvan. 

I know that’s why I said it wasn’t available in the US. Some slips can be picky about their deflocculant and bone china is difficult in general which is why I was hoping it would do find with sodium silicate.