Historical Coil Carve
Artist statement:
For this piece, we were assigned to find a historical sculpture dating back at least 1,000 years or more but to also recreate the overall base and shape of the inspired pot. I found an old pot that dated back thousands of years ago in early Egypt. With designs that depict an early boat from their civilization. But what I really liked about the pot was its size and I thought I could create a pot that resembled it almost completely.
The materials that I used for my pot include: needle tools, smooth surfaces, brushes and glaze for the colors.
I first started off by rolling out a small circle for my base, and then I gradually rolled out some coils and stacked them on each other one by one. Eventually, that was getting too time-consuming so I decided to use the coil presser and that was when things started to get much easier, cause I was not rolling so much each time. Then - like the last project, I had to slip and score each of my coils onto each other and also blend them in more by using a flat metal surface tool. Once the shape of this was complete I decided to add a flat rim at the top to really make it look like an ancient pot.
As much as this project was really fun to make and I enjoyed it a lot, it got quite stressful for me because I work slowly and it this was time-consuming for me particularly, this was because I was out sick a few times and I paid attention too much to the overall height of it rather than the length of it, as a result, it ended up becoming too big and took a lot of time out of my schedule. If I could redo this project I would definitely pay attention to the length of it and make sure it looks exactly the way I want it to. One of the other problems that I faced was because of its size it would end up drying too quickly and that would make it harder for me to look for spots to blend in some of the cracks. But I learned a lot from this project overall and how to handle clay carefully and I think that in time it will help me when I make future projects that are clay based.