Why make marks 1: The nature of the material.
One of the most wonderful features of clay is that it is plastic when it is wet. This means that you can move it, bend it, fold it - and make marks in it. Some of the earliest pots have rope or stick marks in them. I guess humans have always wanted to explore and see the consequences of their actions on materials.
My Clay
I’ve worked with many different clay bodies in my pottery journey over the years, mainly stoneware bodies. These fire to quite a high temperature (1200⁰C -1300⁰C), being in between earthenware firing temperatures (1100 - 1200⁰C) and porcelain (1300 ⁰C and above). I like stoneware because it is durable for everyday use, meaning it doesn’t chip quite so easily as earthenware, and more often than not, it becomes vitrified in the firings. This means……
Introduction. A context, Clay.
In this series of blogs I am hoping to explore more deeply what I like to do as a potter and why I do those things.
I thought that I would start at the beginning, with the clay itself. People have been digging into the ground for many thousands of years, using what they found there to improve their lives. Human curiosity and creativity is insatiable. Somewhere, someone, 10,000 years or so ago¹, realised that clay when placed in a fire creates a different material and ceramics was born.
My pots are merely a tiny step in this long lineage, connecting the distant past with life in the 21st century. Like so many UK potters my work is partly informed by Japanese and Korean ceramics. There is a rich history of the transfer of ideas…