coil and carve

Artist statement:

In this project we were supposed to create a carved pot that showed we understood how to construct with coils. The carving design had to be original but it could be abstract, organic, or geometric. Part of the situation with these pots was that they should have pretty thick walls so that you have plenty of room to carve without completely cutting through. Considering I wanted to keep up with my theme of the ocean I did a seaweed inspired carve with organic and flowy type seaweed coming up from the bottom of my pot. I also knew that I wanted my pot to not be too tall, I was okay with it being more squatty than having it be extremely tall.

Since this project was focused on the ceramic skill of coils, that's exactly what I started with doing for this project. Using the diameter of about 1/2"-1" I used the coil maker to just make a pile of coils. I started with a circle base which was about 1/4" thick and about 5-6" in diameter. I used the famous "scratch, scratch, water attach" to add each coil on top of each other smoothing everything out both on the inside and the outside of the pot after about 3 coils. I used a wooden tool, a metal rough tool, and a metal smooth tool to join all the coils together and make a cohesive design. Once the coil pot was finished and smooth I used a metal carve tool to carve out the seaweed. I started with pretty shallow carves and moved to deeper carves as I went to make sure that I wouldn't accidentally push through to the other side of the pot. I used a navy blue glaze to expand the deep sea aesthetic.

I ended up liking this final product a lot more than I thought I would. I found that when working with coils it often dried a lot faster than I would have liked and so by the time I was smoothing it out, it was almost too dry to fully get rid of the finger prints. By the time it was bisque fired I didn't like it a ton because I thought it looked a little sloppy and not super neat. Once the dark glaze was on it though, it sort of smoothed out the imperfections and was dark enough that your eye is more drawn to the color than the actual design of the pot. It also makes the seaweed design look pretty cool. If I were to do this project again, I would make sure to work a lot faster and keep my clay a lot more wet so that I could smooth it out more.