Turning Stone Pottery » Pottery Publications

A Potter’s Dictionary

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:21:16 +0000

The long history of pottery has allowed it to evolve its own jargon. Each culture has established their own pottery terms to refer to tools and ingredients or define processes and techniques. These terms are extremely varied and extensive. If you are soon planning to enter into pottery, knowing these terms might be very helpful. What follows is a list of the most common pottery terms.

Greenware: This refers to unfired clay piece.

Biscuit or Bisque: These terms refer to pottery that has been fired once, but still lacks glaze.

Bloating: This refers to the swelling of ceramic pots during firing because of the expansion of trapped gases. Bloating can be prevented by kneading the clay very well to expel out trapped air.

Blunging: This is the process of wetting clay or ceramics when it becomes too dry.

Glaze: Is a finishing material applied to ceramics and pots to achieve a glass-like finish.

Enamel: This refers to the colored decorations with glass-like appearance applied to ceramics. Because of its shiny appearance, it is also called on-glaze decoration.

Crawling: This is the parting of the glaze during drying or firing. The glaze shrinks and cause unglazed areas to appear onto the surface of the pots.

Shivering: Refers to the flaking of glaze during firing. The worst case scenario in glazing happens when crawling and shivering happen together.

Terracotta: Red-colored clay body. Commonly found in China and other parts of Asia

Lawn: A potter’s sieve used to sift out fine and coarse clay or ceramic particles.

Grog: Is a collective term for coarse ceramic particles usually produced after pounded ceramic is sifted in a lawn.

The list doesn’t stop there, however. The collection of pottery terms is rich and very extensive it can come up with its own dictionary. But don’t be intimidated. You’ll quickly learn the jargon of pottery as you go through learning its techniques and its art.

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Know Famous Pottery

admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:25:32 +0000

You don’t have to be a historian to identify the famous pottery wares that have littered the history of man.

How about the soldiers of the Imperial Bodyguard, which are life-sized terra cotta human and horse figures that number to about 6,000 and were created in 210 BC for the tomb of Chinese Qin dynasty’s Emperor Qin Shihuangdi? Discovered in a burial mound in 197 in the northern province of Shaanxi, these famous pottery works of art have been featured in countless documentaries and even movies such as the recent The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

There also are the Gravettian figurines discovered at Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic, one of which is the Venus of Dolni Vestonice (Věstonická Venuše), a nude female statuette. They are some of the earliest known pottery, dating back to 29,000 to 25,000 BC.

Famous pottery, which you may not be able to name but are important in the history of the art nonetheless, are those from the Jōmon people of Japan. They produced “cord-marked” vessels (the precise meaning of the term “Jōmon”) in around 10,500 BC by wrapping sticks with cords around clay vessels and figures, accounting for the image of their wares.

How about the vases made by the Greeks? They are by far the most sophisticated forms of early pottery, having survived in larger numbers compared to other ceramic groups of a comparable age.

And how about the Song dynasty pottery from the 10th to 13th century AD? They are one of the many pottery wares that were truly outstanding at that time of Chinese pottery history. They were simply shaped by elegant nonetheless, even more so with their glazes.

Even with just a little background in history, surfing the Internet, a couple of visits to the museum, or browsing your high school/college history textbook, you’ll be able to identify pieces that are quite well known.

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A Lesson on Pottery History

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:29:13 +0000

Pottery history can be traced back to 29,000-25,000 years ago at Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic where ceramic objects have been discovered such as the Venus figurine. This is a nude female figure statuette, and animal models.

Other early forms in early pottery history are those excavated from Yuchanyan Cave, Southern China. These are said to be from 18,000 years ago. Pottery fragments from Catal Huyuk, Turkey date back to 6,500 BC and were made by stacking coils or rings of clay from a circular base, after which the walls are smoothed and thinned from both the inside and outside, then fired inside a bread oven or a basic kiln. Early wares in the history of pottery were usually bare and undecorated, but where there’s decoration, the methods used are often only incising or pressing into the damp clay.

The invention of the potter’s wheel in 3,000 BC proved to be a very important milestone in pottery history, as even now when one thinks of a symbol for the art, the potter’s wheel is usually what comes to mind. Making pots or any kind of wares perfectly round is now possible through the use of it.

History is actually littered with a lot of traces of pottery. There were the vases made by the Greeks in so sophisticated manners that you might not think they were made between the 6th and 5th centuries BC. There are the blue and white ceramics from China which many people associate to the thought of porcelain and fine china; the African terra cotta figures that date back to 5th century BC; glazed ceramics from the 9th to 1st century BC. Whichever item you look at, whether in a museum or the Internet, and no matter how severely undecorated they are, they all paved the way for pottery to be what it currently is today.