Old and New

Today my whistling vessel finally came together!!!

"Came together" there is a very accurate operative phrase. Welding my chosen whistle body, the by-now-dried main chamber, and a clay headpiece and handle together took some patience. I imagine most original potters (and most potters in general) did their work in one go as much as possible, but my schedule and the learning process here complicated things for me a little bit. It took a fair amount of coaxing to get the old dried clay to join properly with newer, wetter clay - in the end, though, I think I had success. Next, we'll see if it survives firing!

I have to admit, I'm pretty tempted to take this opportunity to go into an extended metaphor about melding current culture with the past, reshaping and recovering what we know and feel about ancient civilizations until they become more amenable to assimilation in the present. Something along that line definitely occurred to me often as I worked on my vessel today - though that could be blamed on the fact that I've been over my head in research and writing for my history-of-archaeology-in-popular-culture thesis for what feels like forever now. Suffice it to say that it seems to me that often, the things that we perceive as unyielding and unchangeable - dried, solid clay, for example - end up actually quite malleable, changing here and there until they can be brought into the next stage of development required of them.

See- you can hardly tell where the seams are! :~) That hollow handle was awfully tricky, though. I tried to do it by wrapping a flat rectangle of clay into a tube, but given the bend in the handle this quickly became complicated. I kept thinking of using a mold, but the question of how to remove the mold without disturbing the clay perplexed me. Perhaps molding it then letting it dry - or just using slightly drier clay - would have helped? Mine was quite soft - as a result, now it'll need some sanding to help with those lumps . . .