Something Worth Keeping, at Last

Yes indeed, today I am one unfired coiled pot the richer. It doesn't sound like much - but it definitely feels very good!

As I mentioned at the start of the semester, making a pot this way takes a lot of concentrated work. At the end of a solid two hours (and building upon my experience of the past few weeks) I had a pot only six or so inches high, and wide enough for my small fist to turn within it. To make a similarly-sized pot on a modern wheel would take me half the time most likely, and look better to boot; though in each case, it must be taken into account that I am quite a novice. It would be interesting to consider the time investment on such a project for a potter experienced in both methods - I have a feeling it could reflect on the way human attitudes towards time and material products change.

As a side note to this story of some success - I tried an alternate method as well today which ended up a definite failure. "All this time I have been building the pot from the bottom up," I thought to myself; "yet I have been tempted to turn it upside down quite often, to work on the lower edges, and my upper rim usually ends up very sloppy. What if I built the pot from the top down instead?"

It turns out that what happens when I build a pot by starting with the rim on the table and building up/in from there is complete confusion. Pretty soon I had resorted to flipping the thing over multiple times, smoothing the coils in everywhich direction, and giving up hope entirely of ever fitting an evenly domed base. The experiment still did me well, however, because it made me more confident in my original method. If I do not question my assumptions, even basic ones about which way to start something "makes the most sense," then what I can learn from these exercises would be very limited.

While my product isn't exactly impressive and most certainly will never end up in a textbook like those I am emulating, I can't help but feel proud of it. Not proud in the material sense (to be honest I've rather hidden it from everyone else at the pottery studio!) but proud in a more spiritual sense. While it's true I'm just puttering, and really have no clue what I'm doing, I still made a pot, still had fun, still learned something - and in my own way, felt that connection with the past that was the goal of this project all along.

Round Two: The Pot Thickens

My second attempt at making a coiled pot ended up the same as the first: in bits and pieces at the end of the day. The process of getting there, however, taught me a few new things . . .

-First of all, I came to class having done my research, and armed with a bunch of modern-day advice on how to make a coiled pot - things like which way to smooth the coils, how thick to make them, etc. While this new knowledge made me feel a bit more confident coming in to my second attempt, as I began to work with the clay once more it almost instantly faded from my mind. (Too busy thinking about ancient people to remember the current ones I suppose - perhaps one of the more therapeutic aspects of this project. :~D)

-That said, I did indeed make my coils thicker and it helped considerably in blending things together. The one downside to this was that I quickly became blend-happy and in no time the walls of my pot had expanded, going from a compact fist-sized base to a floppy, listing mess in only a few distressed inches. Lesson for the day: moderation!

-I also experimented with the base of my pot. Instead of making the base by coiling a spiral until it looked big enough, I tried making a circular slab first and then welding the upright coils to its edges. There were several issues with this: first of all, I am worse at making a circular slab than I am at making a circular spiral, especially without the use of a modern press; second, the pounded-down slab dried out considerably as I prepared a coil for the walls and put up quite a fight when it came time to put everything together. 

-So far I have been working really only with my hands and water, on the basis that industrially-formed metal scrapers and needles probably weren't very common during the Jomon period. But I wonder what tools they did use? After last time, I'm fairly certain anyone making a coiled piece (and expecting its walls to be somewhat regular) would need to have a reasonably flat surface for rolling - and those don't occur very often in nature. And what about scoring? What about flattening? What about making sure the pot has a uniform shape? Often I found it helped me to turn my work-in-progress completely upside down to smooth things out. However, this resulted in sub-par (if relatively smooth) work and I wonder if the first people building these pots were tempted to do the same, made the same mistake, then found a better way, perhaps using a mold or stand or . . . ?

After struggling with the thickness of the walls of my pot, I've become very interested in what firing the clay will do - if it will have a sort of evening effect (given that I get the walls regular enough to hold together in the first place) or if it will do the reverse and highlight any irregularities. It looks like the answer to that question, however, will not be coming for some time . . . 

Ancient Beginnings

So, I just finished my second class period of Independent Studies in Clay, and my first attempt at making something this semester. The past week or so has been a lesson in the difficulties of research and the importance of tools and materials. In envisioning this course, I had expected somehow to jump into recreating all sorts of cool ancient pottery: but then, I was reminded of technical issues like local clay-based techniques and old technology I haven't got access to, like hand-operated wheels.

Despite these issues, I have plowed on - with a slight attitude adjustment. My goal in the coming weeks is to do my best to replicate some ancient pottery techniques from across the world, not for some grand or important experiment, but to gain an appreciation for ancient knowledge and for those who try to understand or use it. Plus it just sounds super fun :~)

And boy, was today ever a success! I'll have to bring my camera on future days to document some of the steps - and some of the issues. I've decided to begin the semester with a small pot styled after the early Jomon period in Japan, which is one of the oldest pottery traditions yet found in the world. This means the pot will be of low-fire clay, round-bottomed, made using a coil technique, and eventually decorated with raised bands and/or rope implants.

I say "will be" because, well, my efforts today ended up in the scrap bin. But I'm okay with that, because I had a truly awesome time wrestling with the clay and encountering questions. I've never made a coiled pot before, and as my reference book says, few specifics have been published about Jomon technique. After lots of trial, error, and laughing at myself, I emerged from the pottery studio with a few main thoughts in mind:

-Coiling and blending the bottom of the pot seems to give a pretty solid base, though not necessarily a circular one! I'm sure a more experienced artist than I could do better; however, for interests' sake I might try to look up other methods. With reasonably wet clay, though, I found I could create a bottom that was cohesive enough to show no evidence of the individual coils when I sliced it apart "just to see."

-At first reading that the pots were rounded on the bottom made me raise an eyebrow: "wouldn't that be harder than making a flat bottom?" I thought. The answer is no. After an hour of melding my walls to the bottom of my pot in increasingly desperate ways, I found I did indeed have a rounded edge to the bottom of my pot. Perhaps early Jomon potters were dealing with the same issues and decided to make do?

-My library book on pottery traditions mentioned particularly the thin walls on early Jomon pots. So I figured my coils better be thin as well. Wrong again! The process of blending the coils together naturally thinned out my already-skinny coils. Next time I will use thicker coils and see if that makes it easier. The difficulty smoothing things together may also be a product of my clay/my extended handling of the clay.

-The process of making a pot this way is long. Part of that emphasis is my modern bias talking. Still, though, I wonder how many pots an individual would really have made, especially in a non-agricultural society. The process also would really be helped along by a good flat rock surface and perhaps some rock scrapers, as well as a source of water ready at hand. Tough stuff to identify at a site, I'm sure, but it'd be interesting to know if those ever turn up.

Mostly, as mentioned before, I emerged from class today filled with exciting (to me, at least!) questions. Since I've been watching old Psych lately, I began fantasizing about being an archaeological "psychic," making connections based on knowledge of ancient methods and materials rather than on facial clues and drug trivia. Yeah, yeah, pretty silly I know :~) But by exploring ancient methods of making things, I feel like we can get just one step closer to peeking, however briefly, into ancient peoples' minds.