historical pot

Artist statement:

For this project I was asked to make a recreation of a historical pot. Showing off the coil technique. I ended up choosing to base my pot off of an ancient Japanese pot that was made in around 300BCE-300CE. It was a brown and smooth pot and had some signature curves at the top. Our rendition of the pot also had to be at leat 10" tall or wide. I decided to make mine at least 10" tall and to make sure that I captured some of the signature curves. I didn't copy the pot exactly, I decided I wanted mine to have handles, but I was going to try my best to keep the same organic shapes that the original artist used.

Since this was a coil project, I decided to switch to making the many many coils using the coil machine instead of hand rolling of them. I made around 50 of the 1/2" coils and scored and slipped them together like velcro. To be honest there wasn't anything special to build this pot, just a lot of repetition and trying to make sure that the spot stays even over the center of the slab base that it was built on.

I do think that the hardest part of this project was time management. The pot was so big that some of the coils dried out before I could fully smooth them all out therefore the final product is a little bit rough. I also found it was hard to keep all the coils even, the pot turned out quite lopsided. I do think this was a very helpful pot for me to learn to make because all the mistakes I made, I know how to change for later.