Historically Inspired

Artist Statement

This was my coil project summative. For this project I was given the prompt that I had to find a classical pottery style, and select one pot from that style of ceramics, that had to be at least 1000 years old, and the my finish project had to be a minimum of 10 inches in one dimension. So I chose a Pre-columbian guinea pig as my inspiration.

I had a lot of challenges during this project, despite the fact that I felt like that I had the coil technique down. To be able to make the 10 inch mark I had to build my project vertically instead of horizontally, this led to a lot of challenges while adding the final details future on. Due to the moisture and the weight of the pot after smoothing the main structure of the guinea pig when I tipped it over horizontally to add on the final details the it would tend to crack. Adding on the extra weight of the spout of the pot just made the cracking worse. Which took a while to fix. Eventually when I finished dealing with the constant cracking of the pot I was able to put it through the bisque firing. I then decided to use a more of a rustic type of glaze because I thought it would match the age of 1000 years or older, this pot took more time than usual to glaze because of its large surface area, but then after the glaxe firing it came out just the way I wanted it to.