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 . . .