Ancient Web: Carol Marians Turned Glaze Tests into a Decade-Spanning Lab Notebook

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A ceramic glaze can look like pure artistic intuition until someone lays out the test tiles, ingredient ratios, and kiln schedule that created it. Carol Marians has spent years making those hidden experiments visible.

Explore the Glaze Research index.

Marians's site is a personal research gallery, not a storefront. The index arranges documented glaze trials year by year, from 2010 through 2026. It invites readers to request additional information about recipes, empirical formulas, and firing conditions. Its stated aim is to share the different effects obtained through systematic changes to materials.

The 2025 copper-color experiment is a good example of the site's value. Marians varies the balance of strontium oxide and calcium oxide while recording how the glaze shifts from black to aqua and then toward green. The page gives molecular fractions and describes the differences in the resulting fired surfaces.

A photographic gallery with reproducible notes

Other entries go deeper into the kiln. One interacting-glazes study documents a bowl with an inlaid design, the exact composition of both glazes, a clay-body description, and separate heating and cooling schedules. The reported temperatures rise to 2310 degrees Fahrenheit before a carefully staged descent.

The site also displays close-up photographs of crystals and color bands that appear where different glaze materials interact. These images belong to real tested objects, not decorative illustrations disconnected from an explanation.

The author's homepage identifies her as a potter and links the research to publications and a pottery gallery. Its copyright range begins in 2005, although that notice alone does not establish the first date of the present glaze-index design.

This is a later specialist-preservation exception rather than a 1990s survivor. Its importance lies in the habit of recording every trial in a durable, navigable public collection. Readers should not assume the published firing procedures are appropriate for any kiln without technical expertise or current safety guidance.

The experiments bridge two cultures sometimes treated as opposites: the studio artist seeking an unexpected color, and the researcher documenting why it appeared.

Browse the yearly test results and a detailed firing record.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.