Firing ceramics by hand in the Laurentians with the pottery collective Goregama

It's the final push of a 40-hour firing when a dozen people converge around a hulking wood kiln in the Laurentian forest, stuffing split logs into the firebox, blocking every crack and opening. The heat is immense. When it's done, they will all sit back, dirt-streaked and exhausted, talking about what they've accomplished.

Goregama is a collective of ceramic artists who gather twice a year in Gore, Quebec, to fire their work in an anagama-style wood kiln. It's a group of potters, technicians, instructors, and hobbyists ranging from their late 30s to early 80s who've been doing this together since 2019. They do this without hierarchy nor formal structure.

It all starts with a kiln

In 2016, ceramics technician Lily Lanken was sharing studio space with Margaret Griffin, who mentioned she was heading up to the country to talk about building a wood kiln. Lanken tagged along, mostly curious. "My only experience at that point was building a cob oven with my brother," she says.

They ended up at Joan Scott's off-grid property in Gore where Scott and her husband Gary had been hand-building a house in a maple forest grove without power or running water over 25 years. There were seven present that day, and they decided to build a wood kiln.

Daniel Gingras, who'd studied wood firing and kiln building in Japan with artist Carmen Abdalla, designed the structure: An anagama kiln of salvaged bricks from another dismantled kiln in Val-David, harkening back to a style from 5th-century China before spreading to Japan and Korea. Usually built into hillsides and stretching 40 feet, Goregama's would be more compact—maybe 12 feet long with an 11-foot chimney, capable of holding about 400 pots, depending on their size.

It took two years to build in the end, with each brick ground down and cleaned. "It was extreme labour at some point," Lanken remembers. "Sometimes I was just like, 'why am I doing this?' But it was fun working outside."

The first firing was in 2018. The plan: fire twice a year, roughly around the equinoxes. (June's timing is partly practical—most members need their work ready for Val-David's 1001 Pots festival by early July.) By the time potter Robin Hutchinson joined a few years later, the collective had found its rhythm.

Flame, ash, earth

An anagama kiln is fundamentally different from the electric kilns most ceramicists use today. Electric kilns are oxidation firings—they produce bright, clean colours and predictable results. It's as easy as flipping a switch, walking away, and coming back when it's done.

A wood-fired anagama is reduction firing—close and careful work with flame, ash, earth, and time. The kiln is essentially a long tunnel with a firebox at one end and a chimney at the other. You load it with pots, then feed wood into the front continuously for 40 hours straight. The flame pulls through the kiln, dragging ash with it. That ash settles on shoulders, rims, surfaces. Where it lands thickest, you get glassy greenish-yellow or blue deposits. Where the flame licks directly, you get burnished, darkened clay.

It is earthy, mysterious, and marked by fire in ways that can't be replicated.

"The beauty and the passion that's developed for firing in an anagama kiln is that you get to play with unpredictability," Hutchinson explains. The flame moves differently depending on how pots are stacked, what ingredients are in the clay, even the weather—wind, humidity, temperature.

"We do try to set the stage for what can happen. And then we welcome what happens."

Lanken puts it more technically: "Once you realize what an electric-fired piece looks like versus wood-fired, you can really tell."

The anagama brings out golds, deep browns, shadowy tones that feel pulled from nature itself. A 2,000-year-old aesthetic opposite of industrial efficiency.

A fire that doesn't sleep

Every September weekend is spoken for: one for prep work, one to load the kiln, one to fire, one to unload. People arrive with gazebos, tents, food, drinks. Gary does a small Buddhist blessing before the kiln is lit.

Then it begins, slowly at first, feeding wood every five minutes to coax the temperature up without shocking the clay. As the heat climbs past 1,000 degrees, the pace intensifies. By the peak, you're stoking every 30 seconds. Flames shoot back at you. You wear protective gear and keep moving.

With everyone's work in the kiln together, the work is divided into shifts of four-hour blocks, usually two or three people at a time. Hutchinson describes a collective risk everyone takes, where no one can claim the 'best spots' in the kiln or leave sections empty; the anagama is filled to the brim, which means accepting that some of your pieces will be in cooler zones, some in hotter ones.

"We're all dependent on each other," Hutchinson says. "We're all responsible for everybody's work. There's a great deal of trust in each person's ability to make a decision."

Despite physical exhaustion and cold nights where temperatures can drop to 2°C in late summer, the smoke, and the relentless stoking, there's never been a blowout.

"I've been in this group for about five years now," Hutchinson says. "I've never seen a confrontational situation where people are angry or upset. We generally talk it out."

Lanken echoes this: "We don't fight. We definitely have strong opinions. But at the end of the day, we're in there for the greater good."

Burning bright

The question folks like Lily and Robin get is often 'why?': Three cords of wood. Forty hours of continuous firing. Sleeping in cars or tents. Raccoons trying to steal food while you tend the kiln at 3 a.m., listening to owls and foxes in the dark.

"First off, because it's fun," Hutchinson says, laughing. But she means it. "It's a challenge. Potters are drawn to the... I was going to say magic, but that's a bit too woo-woo. It's really he poetry of setting the stage for the elements to work together."

There's also something deeply counter-cultural about the process. "It's completely different from the culture we live in, in that it's slow, it's long, it's labour-intensive, and it's unpredictable," Hutchinson says. In a world optimized for speed and uniformity, the anagama refuses both. Nothing happens unless you make it happen. Every degree of heat requires another piece of wood. Every pot emerges marked by the specific conditions of that firing, the unrepeatable taking on a physical form.

But more than that, she's drawn to the communal experience. "It's like we're a family," she says. "I've made a lot of friendships from it."

The collective has about 13 to 15 members now, though the number fluctuates. There's a waiting list. People come and go as their lives change. When there's an opening, someone new gets invited, usually for one or two firings before joining permanently. It's organic, shaped by who shows up and keeps showing up.

A ritual of unloading

After the firing ends and the kiln cools for days, there's one more ritual: the unloading.

Someone climbs inside the kiln and starts handing out pieces. They're passed hand to hand, potters receiving each pot big and small with audible appreciation. "We all ooh and ahh over them," Hutchinson says. "There's a kind of ownership of everybody's work."

"Although we don't make the pots together, they are fired all together," Hutchinson explains. "And that's what unifies all of these pots."

"Everything has to be done by somebody. It only happens through a lot of effort."

Hutchinson connects it to other traditional crafts—shearing sheep, spinning wool, digging clay from the earth.

"There's an intimacy that you get in your life by making things by hand in a slow and cumbersome process. Dirty, long, difficult—and you make something beautiful."

The resonance of intention

"When we use an object that is made with intention, that is made by hand with intention, there's a kind of resonance that infuses our life," Hutchinson says. "And when that intention has taken a great deal of effort, where you can see the impact of flame and of ash, there's a richness that it brings."

She pauses, then continues: "I think anybody who's ever used a cup or a bowl made by hand feels it. As we do more and more of these firings, and as this work becomes more and more available, people feel that beauty. They feel that warmth, that resonance that comes from work that is done with so much intention."

The statement would sound precious if the effort of the work that goes into it weren't so demanding: The month's worth of weekends in Gore. The 40-hour burn. The hand-to-hand unloading. The shared risk and reward.

Lanken, who still doesn't quite call herself "a real potter" despite nearly a decade with Goregama, puts it simpler: "It's definitely less about the individual pieces and more about what we're doing together."

That tension between individual craft and collective effort, between control and surrender, between ancient tradition and contemporary practice, is what makes Goregama a lasting presence that crafts for the sake of it.

Because it produces something you can't get any other way: pottery that carries the marks of a rare fire, and the unseen marks of the community behind it.

Goregama brings its wood-fired ceramics transformed by the same intense fire to Poterie Foster, featuring eleven artists and a rare process photography. Vernissage on October 18, exhibition runs until November 23rd, 2025.