A ceramist wants to arrive as an artist, a ceramic glaze wants to arrive at the right glaze temperature. Greg Daly calls this “arriving at temperature” in his glaze travels. Who dares to say that there is no poetry in ceramic glazes?

Daly provides methods to investigate at which temperature glazes melt, but no (theoretical) tools to  predict this for a given glaze. However, you do need this if you want to design a glaze with a predetermined temperature. If you don’t know which corner to look in, it is also hard to get there.

Glaze temperature is a mechanism, as there are several in glaze technology. To be able to decipher this mechanism you have to look from the right angle (more about this in this blog).

For glaze temperature this is the oxide level. If we dissect a glaze into oxides (the different molecules in a glaze) it is possible to discover trends.

I am still researching how to arrive as an artist, but I have guidelines to arrive at the right melting temperature for any glaze. In this blog I explore the three main ratios:

• SiO₂ -Al₂O₃
• RO₂ -RO
• B₂O₃