Historical Coil Pot

Artist Statement

For this piece, I was assigned to find a historical vessel or sculpture dating back 1,000 years or more, and recreate the form while making the glaze or decoration contemporary and of my own inspiration. I found an old Kamares Ware Vessel, whose form really spoke to me, and used this as my guiding shape for my own work. Essentially, the idea was to combine historical elements and someone else's work with contemporary ideas and my own design.

After doing some research on my chosen vase, I created a paper cutout of half of the pot from the front to help guide the shape of the pot as I built in the vertical direction. I started off by rolling a slab base and cutting out a circle with the desired diameter. On this, I scratch and water-attached coil upon coil, which I had made using the coil maker, every four or so ruffing them up and then smoothing them out to combine them into one solid form. My paper cutout soon became too small for the base that I had started, so I continued to build upward using the original image of the Kamares Ware vessel I found as a guide to get the correct form. Once the vessel itself was complete, I created some handles out of coils that I flattened, smoothed everything out, and let it set up. I then created a sort of stencil outline of the design I created, and sketched it onto the vase with pencil. Using a red underglaze and a fine-tipped paintbrush I painted on multiple layers to create my design. At this point, the vase was bisque fired, after which I used a clear glaze over top and then glaze fired it.

The beginning processes in creating this vase was to do research on the vessel whose form inspired my work. I looked closely at the ratios of the handle to the whole body as well as the curvature of the vase. After doing some sketches and creating the paper cutout I started to form my coil pot. Since I was able to use the coil maker for this project, the actual building went quite quickly, although I had to wait every so often to allow my vase to set up before adding weight in the vertical direction. As I began building, I quickly realized that my pot would be significantly larger than the intended paper cut out I made, which forced me to constantly look at the image of the historical Kamares Ware Vessel to make sure that I was matching the form closely enough without the paper cut out to guide me. Once I had finished the vase itself, I was very happy with the form and how smoothly the coils had combined, which inspired me to not glaze the whole thing, bt rather to let the natural clay color and form be a part of the exterior decoration. I enjoy the color red, so I just messed around with some colored pencils and found an abstract design that I really liked. I thought the combination of sharpness and curves in the design contrasted and highlighted nicely with the form of the vessel on which I painted it.