Land Monitor / Fired Volcanic Boulder

Performance kiln/furnace, 20 ft. long, steel, ceramic fiber blanket, propane, earth, borax, lava boulder, near the J volcano outside Albuquerque, NM, 1980.

Left: night firing, kiln in place

Middle: molten state, kiln removed

Right: cooled, fused state

Land Monitor/Fired Volcanic Boulder is the second large environmental performance/ kiln work after Fired and Glazed Earth Piece, 1979. The steel and ceramic fiber blanket kiln was removed at the peak of the firing to expose the mafic (high iron/magnesium – low silica) basalt boulder, from the adjacent volcano, fired to a near-molten temperature, in an attempt for the viewer to physically re-experience the boulder's birth/origin by returning it to a molten state.

The cooled, altered, boulder and fused volcanic sand remained after the firing as a “land monitor,” of similar proportions to the monitor ships (ironclads) of the American Civil War. These ships as images of change were explored in the photo project, Orders of Entropy, 2006

Furnace Projects, Constance Lewallan;

Kiln Projects: Material and Process Experiments in/of the Landscape, John Roloff