Ellen’s blue shino

[Orbit]

Someone on Instagram shared that the gorgeous blue shino they used in a recent soda firing was Ellen’s blue shino, which I have not been able to find a recipe for on Glazy or googling, and saw in a previous thread some years ago that someone else was looking for it and it was potentially in some proceedings from an exhibition. I wondered if anyone knew what the recipe is on here! I would love to use it, it is very beautiful and I will be starting soda adventures at higher temps next month hopefully, so will be able to use shinos finally! I’ll also be participating in 1 or 2 woodfirings this fall that I would love to use it in. 

TIA!

[Min]

This one? If so then maybe Clay Art Center in New York would share the recipe?

(I'm running out of image storage so will delete the image in a short while)

[Orbit]

It was a different image and a lighter blue that covered the entire chawan. 

[PeterH]

Thin pickings.

If you have access to Clay Times Magazine Volume 16 • Issue 86 this article might be of interest and/or provide pointers.

... index and some pages (but not the article)  in https://issuu.com/claytimes/docs/claytimesbackissuesbernadettecurran

... my interest was based on

Description of the show in
https://taradawley.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/1053/
... but couldn't find anything significant there

PS Stumbled across this "what's in a name" paper
American Shino : A Case Study of Cultural Borrowing in the World of Traditional Ceramics
https://konan-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=4047&item_no=1&attribute_id=22&file_no=1
 

Edited July 6, 2023 by PeterH

[Magnolia Mud Research]

To get a "blue" shino: 
Take your own plain shino glaze recipe.  
Add a "pinch" of cobalt to that glaze; make a test to see if you like the "blue";
If not enough blue, add another "pinch" of cobalt; if to much blue, use "half a pinch" (this is just like finding how much sugar you need in you coffee). 
warning: too much cobalt will produce black blue (or a blue black). 

the images are for cone 10 reduction on a studio clay body. 
one is plain shino, the other is shino with cobalt (aka blue):
 
LT

[Orbit]

15 minutes ago, Magnolia Mud Research said:

To get a "blue" shino: 
Take your own plain shino glaze recipe.  
Add a "pinch" of cobalt to that glaze; make a test to see if you like the "blue";
If not enough blue, add another "pinch" of cobalt; if to much blue, use "half a pinch" (this is just like finding how much sugar you need in you coffee). 
warning: too much cobalt will produce black blue (or a blue black). 

the images are for cone 10 reduction on a studio clay body. 
one is plain shino, the other is shino with cobalt (aka blue):
 
LT

Makes sense, although it was a very light blue so I would have to be very careful with the amount of cobalt. I hope I saved the picture on IG for me to reference. I have the feeling the recipe is a little more different than your method, but I could probably end up with something similar…

[Orbit]

8 hours ago, PeterH said:

Thin pickings.

If you have access to Clay Times Magazine Volume 16 • Issue 86 this article might be of interest and/or provide pointers.

... index and some pages (but not the article)  in https://issuu.com/claytimes/docs/claytimesbackissuesbernadettecurran

... my interest was based on

Description of the show in
https://taradawley.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/1053/
... but couldn't find anything significant there

PS Stumbled across this "what's in a name" paper
American Shino : A Case Study of Cultural Borrowing in the World of Traditional Ceramics
https://konan-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=4047&item_no=1&attribute_id=22&file_no=1
 

Really fantastic article! I was waiting for the part when the author would finally get to the history of the Japanese-Korean Pottery Wars. I recently did a one week internship learning Korean traditional Onggi Jar making with Adam Field and was counseled against using the term Mishima as it is a technique the Japanese took from Korea and apparently there is still some bitterness over this and using the Japanese word for it, so I have switched to always using the term inlay instead. I’m someone who has strong feelings about appropriation, and struggle with the amount of cultural appropriation or borrowing that is present in ceramics, though I am loosening up about it a bit as I see how much has ebbed and flowed with trade in addition to war or appropriation, especially since reading Alan Caiger-Smith’s books on Lustre and Majolica, where so much spread through movement of artisans and trade and not nearly as much due to colonialism as I had expected. But that is getting a bit off topic!

[Orbit]

Here is the IG post of the Ellen’s blue shino. It was in soda so that is probably why it is more crystallized and perhaps lighter than the blue shino shown above. 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

I went to IG to see if there were more details in the artist’s description, and they do mention it’s a wood fired piece. The effects on Alex Olson’s pot are consistent with wood ash hitting the rim of the pot and melting inwards, changing that darker blue into a lighter one on the inner walls of the bowl. The crystals are probably from a slow cooling cycle, whether done intentionally or just through sheer thermal mass in a large kiln. Given Alex seems to be using a stoneware clay and the image Min found appears to be a white stoneware or porcelain, there’s a very strong possibility they are indeed the same glaze. I second her suggestion of contacting Clay Art Centre to see if they’ll share it. 

If you aren’t super comfortable doing that, it should be straightforward enough to recreate a similar effect. I don’t know that this recipe is a shino even by western definition, although someone may have started with one as a testing point and kept the name.  Shinos usually contain a lot of ball (or other) clay, and a lot of sodium bearing ingredients like Neph Sye and soda ash. So if someone lowered the clay so it doesn’t want to crawl right off the pot while it’s still drying could have resulted in a more translucent and fluid glaze. Adding a percent or so of cobalt would get you to this result quite readily. You could also take any number of amber glazes and substitute cobalt for iron in the colourants to get a glaze with similar potential to create this effect.