Open Source Curriculum
What is a Kiln?
with John Roloff
July 13, 2024 // Architectural Ceramics series
Summary
Summary of Group Discussion by Rose Schreiber
Select Readings
A Bibliography from John’s Personal Library
Project Land Kilns by John Roloff available for purchase
An artist walkthrough of the exhibition John Roloff: The Sea Within the Land 1980-2019, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Artist Talk about The Land within the Sea II, 2012
Artist Talk about Sentient Terrains, 2012
Artist Interview about A Project for Regina-An Outdoor Firing, 1980
Discussion Guide
About the Topic
Up-draft, down-draft, open-pit, soft brick, hard brick, climbing, tunnel, barrel, beehive, gas, wood, electric, soda, salt, and raku: the kiln is arguably the most enduring architectural component of ceramic production. More importantly, perhaps, the kiln endures as an emblem of transformation. Over millennia the ceramic kiln has served to sinter, harden, distort, and amalgamate, creating much of what we consider as final or complete ceramic form. Using John Roloff’s formative Land Kilns as a starting (and returning) point, we consider broader conceptions of the kiln as condition, site, space, and breath.
A hole in the ground, wildfires and flowing lava, an animal’s lung or its womb, greenhouses, a camera, software, the earth’s core or the earth’s sun, and the tokamak fusion reactor: a “kiln” can be seen as just one aspect of much larger cycles from the molecular to the cosmic.
Can the familiar order, processes and narratives associated with the kiln be adjusted, hybridized, poeticized, or reversed? If the definition of kiln is changed or enlarged, does the definition and entry point into the practice of ceramics also change and evolve?
About the Artist
John Roloff is a visual artist who works conceptually with site, process and natural systems. He is known for his ceramic works and outdoor Land Kilns done from the 1970’s into the 1990’s, as well as other large-scale environmental projects, gallery installations and objects investigating geology, ecology, architecture, ceramics, metabolic systems, poetics, and history.
Roloff studied geology at UC Davis during the formative days of plate tectonics in the late 1960’s, worked with Bob Arneson and William T. Wiley at UC Davis, and received an MFA in 1973 from CSU Humboldt.
Roloff's work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; UC Berkeley Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Venice Architectural and Art Biennales; and The Snow Show in Kemi, Finland. Public and site-specific exhibitions include: Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, CA; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN; I-5 Colonnade Park, Seattle, WA; and Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. Roloff has received 3 visual arts fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a California Arts Council Grant for visual artists.
Roloff is represented by Anglim Trimble Gallery in San Francisco and is Professor Emeritus of Sculpture/Ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute.