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Page of Lexa Laurance[top] [end]Who am II am British living in South West England, where I currently work as a Potter & part time teacher at the University of Bath & Wiltshire College. I also run free-lance Workshops for Schools, Universitys & Community groups.[top] [end]Household energy experienceMy current Pottery, on a working farm together with other rented craft & workshop spaces, is a small part converted farm building, complete with an efficient wood-burning stove(!) & a section of field with a number of small kilns. Most of the kilns are built with low cost/natural/recycled materials and fired with scrap wood, sawdust & occasionally cow-dung i.e. when this has dried out during Summer! Most of the kilns have been built during an annual kiln building & firing course, which I have run together with collegues since my return from working in Malawi in 1989. I also run Free-lance workshops, for a wide range of groups, both at my own Pottery & kiln site and elsewhere in Britain. Last year I ran a clay/'Wattle & Daub' Oven building workshop on a community/childrens play ground site in Bristol I also built a very small portable oven for use at my kiln site.My interest in household energy is both due to my concerns for the environment + the effects of global change and at grass roots level via my experience of working as a Potter in Malawi during the mid-late 1980 s' & a return visit in 2000 & 2001. I have also visited Potters, Potteries & small craft co-operatives in Zimbabwe, Botswana & Swaziland. I worked in Malawi as VSO Development Officer at a medium size production Pottery & laterly Acting Manager, during the mid-late 1980 s' This pottery sadly closed in 1994. I returned to Malawi in 2000 & 2001 to advise a large production Pottery on devising & setting up a range of courses, for local & overseas visitor, at their lake shore Pottery. The pottery already have a number of large wood & sawdust fired kilns & one fired with rice husks inaddition to a few small electric kilns, all of which are used for their main production. I introduced a Charcole fired Raku kiln, wood-fired 'Wattle & Daub' kiln & small low fire Sawdust kiln - this kiln could also be fired with rice husks, dung &/or dry grasses. I trained staff to run the courses & assisted to introduce 2 village Potters who now regularly demonstrate & run workshops for visitors. The Wattle & Daub kiln I built together with staff at Nkhottacota Pottery, Malawi was subsequently built as a bread oven by the mother of one of the staff, in amother part of Malawi. The bread oven enabled her to start a small village business - Unfortunately I did not have time to visit & have not been in touch recently to establish whether her oven is still in operation. When I returned to Malawi in 2000 & 2001 I not surprisingly noted a lot of changes - not least the greatly depleted fuel wood, and obvious difficulties arising from the AIDS crisis as well as agriculture difficulties & food shortages. I was also aware that tin buckets (for water & washing) & cooking pans have largely replaced pots made by village Potters, while most Malawian families still choose to own atleast one village made cooking pot. Village Potters who are very skilled and were previously respected, now have very low status within the community and as a result have difficulty in selling their pots for cash. Also their daughters & nieces, who would previously have been apprentice potters, now have aspirations to move to the towns & city and therefore are now reluctant to learn & practice Pottery skills. Fuel wood in Malawi has to be bought for cash so many families, especially in the villages, can not afford to purchase fuel-wood & struggle to obtain enough alternative fuels for cooking hence many families are not able to cook more than one meal a day... Village Potters now fire their pots with Casava roots or Maize husks + grasses. We could question the place of the village potter, using valuable fuel resources to fire coking pots when tin/metal cooking pots are now widely available. We could also look at gender issues related to materials, production and employment. How much research has been done into efficent cooking pots materials & design? On some stoves 'heavy' cooking pots are much more efficient than light weight materials such as tin/aluminum. lexa@... User:Lexa Laurance 4 May 2006 | |
Page created:
13 April 2006; Last edited:
04 May 2006; Version: 2 | |
Pagename: User:LexaLaurance @HEDON: WADA | |
