Ceramics is the art if or making pots and pottery from hardened clay. For this you need a sculptor, your hands, water, a kiln, a slab roller and a few small tools. However, to be a ceramicist requires much more, with skills and talents such as patience, creativity, collaborative, be able to problem solve and be resilient, just to name a few. Now, if you can’t tell that is ALOT to learn within a semester of ceramics, and I was just scratching the surface of what ceramics really entails (and perhaps some clay along with it). But, throughout this time I believe that I have reached the goals that I wanted to achieve by making one pot that I am proud of…
What I learned
Although my first pot wasn’t a masterpiece to say the least, this first pot helped my set the benchmark for the pots (or in my case pot) to come. This pot game me an understanding of how to work the clay and to really get the feel of ceramics in general and to understand how long that dot texture takes to do.
Learning curve
After that one might assume that the next pots would just get better and better, but this was not the case for my coil pot and secondary pinch pot. For these pots I rushed practically everything, showing little to no resilience in the smoothing, shaping and other steps within the creation of these pots. Despite these pots being a train wreck to say the least they had one immensely important job, they helped my understand some of the skills needed in order to create a semi-decent pot. I learned that I needed to be patient and keep working at my pot and keep trying to fix any problems that arise in the creation of the pot. These skills were vital in the creation of my final pot.
My final pot:
For my final pot I was much more careful and patient, so in order to create a good pot I created a design of the pot prior to creation. This step allowed me to choose the colours of the pot and a shape and look that I wanted to achieve. This may not sound like a lot, but it was certainly better then just “winging it and see what happens”. This plan also made me stick to the plan and not be satisfied until it matched it or better.
the plan:
My plan was to make a floral pot, or one that partially looked like a flower, with a vibrant purple exterior, with a arching a rippling edge to represent and look like petals and vibrant yellow blending slightly darker in the middle to show the pollen and to extenuate the shape and shadows.
Lets see if you think I achieved it:
after this I thought it still needed that vibrant and bright feeling that flowers have so I gloss glazed the purple section:
Summary
From this I learned that ceramics is nowhere as easy as it seams and that to create a good pot you need to be; patient, resilient, creative and have delicate hands, many of which ceramics had taught me allowing me to create the ‘flower pot’.