Historical Pot

The assignment for this project was to find an ancient pot on a website and try to mimic its shape and form. I found the pot in the top left corner because I thought it had a cool shape and wouldn't be extremely difficult to build. I made the pot using the coil technique. I rolled long, thick coils and then coiled them up to from the pot, slipping and scoring them so they wouldn't fall part. I then made a little top out of clay and began the carving process. I used a loop tool to carve out ribbons down the sides, dividing the pot into quadrants. For two of the quadrants, I carved horizontal lines and for the other two, I carved triangles. For glazing, I used PC-29 Olive for the ribbons that divide the pot into quadrants, PC-23 Indigo for the stripes in one quadrant, SM-51 Red for the other striped quadrant and the center of the triangles in another and SM-27 Purple for both the triangles quadrants. I also used the SM-51 for the red on the tip of the pot.

For this project, I really had to use shape. This was due to the fact that I was trying to match another artists shape of a pot, so it was very important to worry about the shape. The patterns I created on the pot were also a big part of this project as well as the balance of the quadrants, two with horizontal lines carved and two with triangles carved. This project evolved from just the basic form of the pot, to the form with the patterns and colorful glazes. When I began this piece, I didn't have any idea of what I was going to do with carving and glazing because the requirements did not state that I had to mimic the artists glazing in my project. The glazing evolved from one color for the entire pot, to much more detail with the variety of colors in the different quadrants.

This project appealed to me because of the many uses it could have. When I saw this pot on the website, I saw that it could be a vase or a lamp or a flower pot. With this in mind, all I had to do was get the shape right and use nice colors so that it could look good in any of these uses. The only way this pot relates to my life is that we have many plants around the house and it would be really cool to have a plant growing out of it and down the sides. I was really proud of the way the carving turned out in this project. The division into quadrants was measured accurately and the triangles and lines worked really well with the glazes. I struggled the most with actually getting the shape of the pot correct. Trying to match the pot that I saw on the website was super difficult and I struggled with it, but once I completed it, the glazing and carving was fun. This artwork could maybe have been stronger with a little more detail to glazing (one spill that is the wrong color) and more time spent on getting the shape perfect, but I was happy with the way it turned out.