When Po Wen Liu had to craft new recipes for our 18 studio glazes, he was determined to precisely match all the colors we had.
The kicker? It only took him one try to get it right.
Reformulating the colorful coatings was a tall order. Our ceramics students have used Sawtooth’s palette of custom glazes for decades, with shades and tints many had fallen in love with. Due to supply chain issues, Po Wen, our Director of Ceramics, knew these same mixtures wouldn’t be available for much longer.
Sometimes, those issues are due to natural causes, like Kingman Felspar, whose key component was naturally depleted decades ago. In the case of our spodumene glaze containing lithium, as Po Wen recounted, many of the mining companies that provided the metal for the ceramics industry also supplied it to car manufacturers for electric models. As you can guess, selling to car manufacturers was more profitable than selling to studio potters and ceramics supply companies.
Late last year, Po Wen heard rumblings about a dwindling supply of Custer Feldspar. Then, he saw costs rise and suppliers run out of stock more frequently. Instead of waiting for the mining companies to find a solution, he decided to act.
Po Wen referenced the Unity Molecular Formula (UMF) developed by the 19th-century German chemist Hermann August Seger, which carefully states the proportion of glass former, flux, and stabilizer in a glaze. Po Wen utilized the UMF, switched out key materials, and then “tinkered with it,” he said, working at the molecular scale to produce the new glaze. After one test, he saw success.
If you walk down to our ceramics studio, you won’t even be able to see a before and after to compare. Our ceramics staff kept our extensive glaze wall as-is, instead of replacing it with the new tiles. They thought: “Why replace everything if the new ones look exactly the same?”
“Similar,” Po Wen quickly corrected, remaining humble about the whole endeavor.
Po Wen’s wealth of knowledge and passion for ceramics can be traced back to his early years. Growing up in Taiwan, near his uncle’s pottery factory, he spent his free time playing with clay and making pinch pots with his cousins. He won first place in every art competition he entered. “It was a big encouragement as a kid,” he said, but as he got closer to graduating high school, it was hard to stay inspired.
Po Wen couldn’t find any universities in Taiwan that offered a ceramics major. “The only option was majoring in arts, and the department would invite a professional potter to teach for two or three months.” Instead, he decided to study Ceramics Engineering and take a different path towards a professional career.
Initially, Po Wen’s studies focused on material science, specifically industrial production processes and glaze chemistry. “Ceramics is a hard, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant material,” he said as he described its various industrial applications: for example, the tiles used on the space shuttle to provide thermal protection were ceramic, and the material for medical applications such as artificial eyes, bones, and other prosthetics is ceramic.
After college, Po Wen worked as an engineer for a porcelain company in Taipei. However, his desire to pursue ceramics in art eventually brought him to study in the US, earning a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from Northern Illinois University. He settled in Greensboro, where he started teaching at Sawtooth and, later, UNCG.
Po Wen quickly became an admired and well-loved teacher at Sawtooth and across the Triad. Although he briefly left to direct two international art centers in Jingdezhen, China—the porcelain capital of the world—he later returned to the States to work at the celebrated Peter’s Valley School of Craft in Layton, New Jersey. When Sawtooth’s Director of Ceramics position opened up early last year, his former students, who had followed his career and kept in touch, called him up and urged him to return.
“My students knew I really wanted to come back to Sawtooth,” he said with a smile, “Sawtooth is one big family among the students, instructors, and staff.”
Po Wen’s right – there’s a unique bond that forms between the folks who come to our almost 80-year-old community art school. When you take a class or workshop at Sawtooth, you learn from artists who are dedicated to their craft and committed to fostering a community that encourages enrichment, experimentation, and growth.
It’s why we say we’re “your space to create.” At Sawtooth, you’re doing more than making–you’re embarking on a journey that will have highs and lows, rewards, and challenges, but a strong support system to help you navigate it all.
Program Directors like Po Wen–and the instructors they invite to teach here–are admired for their expertise and talent. They also ensure that our studios continue to provide high-quality offerings. They troubleshoot issues you wouldn’t even imagine, like finding the perfect LED bulbs for digital light painting, searching across the country for the most efficient dust collector, or, in Po Wen’s case, formulating new recipes to recreate our beloved glazes.
When talking about glazes, Po Wen noted that they’re a functional necessity–keeping surfaces impermeable to liquids, making pottery easier to clean and sanitize–but also a key decorative element.
“Glazes are like the clothes we wear,” he said. “What you wear reflects who you are, reveals your personality. From my perspective, pottery is incomplete without glaze.”
