Historical Inspired

Glazes used: SM-21 SM-63

For this project, our assignment was to research a historical pot that was made at least 1,000 years ago. The pot I chose was a tripod jar from China that was made around 580-690. Another requirement we needed to meet was that in some aspect, in either length or height, our pot had to be 10 inches, mine was about 10in wide. This work was made using the coil method, I build up the body of the pot by layering coils then smoothed out the out and inside as I went. And for the lip on top of the jar I used a slab and manipulated it until it looked like my inspiration piece.

As I previously stated in my first paragraph I mainly used the coil technique for this project. After I made the body and added the lip I didn't like how the bottom of my work wasn't as rounded as the historical pot. So I cut the bottom off and reconstructed it to be more rounded and to flow with the rest of the piece. Once I was done constructing my pot and had been bisque-fired, I glazed it. The glazes I used were SM-21 and SM-63 (yellow and blue) to keep the same color scheme as the historical pot.

At first, I had a hard time finding a historical pot that I wanted to use as my inspiration, but when I found this one I thought that it was a bit out of my comfort zone, I had never made something with legs let alone only 3 legs and I usually use lighter colors and I never used much yellow when glazing. That is one of the main reasons I wanted to try this pot to try a few new techniques. Another aspect of this project that was out of my concert zone was the size requirement. Some things I struggled with were making it that 10 inches and working with coils. But I overcame these struggles by working with the clay and making adjustments throughout my prosses. Something that I could do to make my work stronger is to choose slightly different colors and fix how the two colors meet.