Historical Inspired Ceramic Form

For this piece, the assignment was to research a historical pot that is at least 1,000 years old, and we must recreate it but put a modern touch on it. I chose a very pretty light blue/green pot that I believed was used for different liquids such as oils, and decided I wanted to modernize the color and shape slightly, but did not want to take away from the natural creative elements of the piece. Therefore I went with a darker color, made the pot more rounded, and changed the proportions.

In order to create this piece, I first started with the coil technique. I rolled out lots of very thick coils and cut out my base from a slab. Then I started wrapping my coils around my base and did this until I got the shape I wanted. Then I smoothed out the whole pot and began rolling out smaller coils to form the little handles. I ended up using three coil wraps per each handle and then attached all four to the pot. After this was done, I went around and smoothed out the pot as much as I could, before setting it out the dry and be bisque-fired. After the bisque firing, I chose to use a deep blue color to make it more unique and modern, SM-21, and glazed this pot with around four coats, before it was glaze-fired. Once it was finished in the kiln, I was able to photograph it and gift it.

There was a little research at the beginning of this project when deciding what pots we wanted to base our creation on. But other than that research there were no other revisions or research I needed to do for this piece. The only struggles I faced during this piece were photographing this piece and smoothing out the inside. The hole of the pot on top barely fit my hand, and therefore once I closed the pot, it was very difficult to smooth out the inside and glaze it as much as I would have liked. Another issue was I forgot to photograph this piece in the studio before I took it home. So in order to still get a professional photograph, I needed to use paper and natural light to get the best possible outcome for my photograph. In the end, I am very happy with the results and very much like how it turned out.

Historical Pot Research Information: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NEnIKft-2J4cDyPbwHudLeOpxFwBMdJngd4ImMWmeQc/edit?usp=sharing