How Mata Ortiz Pottery Is Made

today I've come to the pottery making Village of ma Ortiz in northern Mexico and I'm going to show you how they make their Pottery here but I'm not going to approach it like a tourist or like a pottery collector instead I'm going to do something that I haven't seen done before I'm going to approach the pottery of Mo Ortiz from the perspective of a Potter so we're going to be doing a deep dive on the methods and the techniques that they use here to make their beautiful pottery so come with me and let's explore the pottery of ma Ortiz Chihuahua [Music] now here in MO Ortiz they do sometimes use commercial products to make their Pottery but as far as I could determine all the clay they use comes from the earth dug locally in that area of all the Potters I talked to it seemed like every everyone had their own distinct type of clay that they used their own recipe their own sources for clay so there may be as many different recipes for clay as there are Potters in this Village but all the clay that they use does come from the local Earth now Miguel Lopez has agreed to take me out here and show me where he digs clay and so this is what he's doing here the one big mystery I never did solve with ma Ortiz Clay is that nobody seems to add temper to their clay or at least they don't seem to have any know of temper when I asked them about it but this material that Miguel is digging here is very unclay likee it's gritty it doesn't have any characteristics that I would look at it in nature and say this looks like clay I want to take this back to my studio and test it out so it's possible that this material is temper that this is just some kind of volcanic ash that they're adding to their clay body and maybe they don't call it temper maybe they call it all barro even though it's not I don't know I'm just saying that I never could get a good answer about temper this is Miguel's wife adelen so they took me out back of their house and kind of ran me through all the steps that they use to process clay their clay body is formed by mixing clay from three different sources and they store the clay in these big bins in their yard and each of those Clays are very distinctive none of them feel especially pure and that might be the trick to not having temper here in that these Clays naturally contain a certain amount of volcanic ash or silt or some kind of grit that is acting as The Temper when they're ready to mix up a batch of clay the clay is put into these large tubs covered with water and soaked when the clay is done soaking it's stirred and mixed up which makes the clay particles suspended in the water temporarily okay with the clay particles suspended in the water the material is then put in a bucket and poured through a screen this step is repeated over and over again with more water being added to the original tub and stirred up and then that material poured through the screen until the water in the original tub has very little color to it it's kind of seethrough then they know that they've got most of the clay out of it they can throw the rest away in the tubs the clay settles to the bottom and the water rises to the top this water is removed I don't know if they skim it off the top or siphon it or pour it off but at any rate water is taken out of the tubs once it's the right consistency the clay is transferred to these barrels and screened again because it might have picked up some impurities while it was sitting in the tub in the barrel it can be covered and kept clean this shallow clothline trough with bricks on the bottom and wood sides is the final step in removing the the water from the clay so that it's usable in making Pottery the semi liquid Clay is covered up to keep contaminants out and allowed to dry further in these trays eventually the clay is moved to the concrete floor of the studio to complete its drawing process Sabino VI Alba's process for clay is very similar although you'll notice that his Clay is a totally different color he uses one ingredient in his clay instead of the three that Miguel use and Sabino tells me that he adds nothing else to the material except that clay from whatever Source it's from now look at the way he's straining this through a shirt that's a very fine SI I can't imagine any temper material passing through that shirt and yet he adds no temper to his clay so there must be something in that clay that's acting as temper that is extremely fine once he's done he places it into this shallow trough that is just the same as what Miguel uses with the bricks on the bottom put a sheet in it and lets it dry Gloria Hernandez processes her clay in a way that is also similar but different she uses a screen that is not as tight as sabino's but is probably tighter than Miguel's her granddaughter lesie keeps the clay stirred up in the first container while she pours it through the screen into the second container she says that she actually performs this same process six times for each clay to make sure it's the finest most pure clay it can be her recipe mixes clay from two different sources and again is a slightly different color and different texture from the other Potters in the end she pours it into a wooden trough very similar to the other potters and lets it dry in a little in a sheet like this see you know Northern Chihuahua was the center of the last great cultural fluorescence in the region known today as the American southwest there in the time between about 1250 to 1450 ad developed the casus grandis culture which made some of the most beautiful pottery in prehistoric North America types such as Ramos ketas and coritos polychrome to name just a few have stunned and excited archaeologists and collectors alike this culture was centered around the massive PUO room RS called Pim which are located about 87 Mi south of the US Mexican border the culture extended out from there in all directions reaching clear into Southeastern Arizona and Southwest New Mexico pime is estimated to have contained 2,000 rooms that reached at least three stories in height and numerous ceremonial architectural features such as platform Mounds Effigy mounds and ball courts the artwork and crafts produced there were Exquisite and included shell jewelry carved Stone copper bells and of course polychrome Pottery M Ortiz lies close to the heart of the kasus grandis culture being only about 20 mies south of the ruins of pakim many kasus grandis ruins lie all along the palanganas river which runs right past Monta Ortiz the pottery Left Behind when these people abandoned this region around 1450 ad provided the original inspiration for Monta Ortiz Pottery as for the tools used to form Pottery here in Moes we have the clay which we've already talked about you got the water bowl which you need we've got what I would call a Pooky what they call a mold day and are usually formed from plaster of Paris here and then you've got the ubiquitous hacksaw blade which they call a sea and Mary is using looks like an upholster needle I see most commonly used an epidermic needle in M Ortiz and she also has this small plastic disc which you'll see used pretty soon the Potter here is Mary chavita and I'm probably ruining the pronunciation of these names so I apologize right off the bat and she is working today in the kitchen of her mother's home her mother's name is Mon hernandz and they were just the nicest people who made us feel very welcome oh that's a good idea Potter of Moz work in a very similar fashion to traditional Potters around the Southwest they start with a flat slab of clay that they call a tortilla and they push that into their mold day or Pooky here Mary is being conscious to get rid of any air bubbles she sees in that slab nice pancake tortilla see tortilla yeah true true they call that tortilla just like they call Ito she there yeah we call it pancake we call it a pancake you know and now here you can see you're using that green plastic disc just the same way I would use the gour scraper to smooth the inside of the pot to press it down into that mold day good she's going to trim off the top and roll her first coil which is all very similar to the way I work in MO Ortiz a coil of clay is called a chiso what you will notice here is the size of the coils in MO Ortiz are very very large so it almost reminds me of back when I first started my channel I was doing something called the one coil challenge where I would see how big a pot I could make from one coil of clay and so these Mo Ortiz coils are very very large and then they just spend a lot of time pinching that thinner and pinching it up as you can see are doing here I've sped this up so you can actually see the walls of the pot rise the steps for coil building a pot that I often give in my lessons are coil Bond pinch scrape and repeat as necessary and you can see she's going through essentially the same process here she scraped the outside now she's created a coil she's bonding it to the pot she'll pinch it up and you can see also as she builds she's using smaller coils as she starts building that neck I believe there are three coils total in this pot now as Mary gets close to finishing this pot you'll notice that she doesn't spend a lot of time getting getting a nice smooth finish or working on the rim and that is because they sand these pots after they're fully dry and I'll go into that more detail in the next chapter this video but just remember that for now at this stage they don't spend a lot of time smoothing it because they sand later this discussion about MTO Ortiz Potters would not be complete if I didn't at least mention the generosity of these people here we are in their home filming the making pottery and they make us a meal oh s GRE how do you say this green bean tomato uhhuh yeah one thing seen frequently in mod Ortiz is Clay drying on the floor so as the clay that they've already processed gets closer to the desired texture and consistency it's often wrapped up and placed on the floor until it dries to the proper consistency interesting here we are in the home of Sabino who we met earlier and his wife Veronica and they're working together to form a decorative plate today yeah you'd be surprised that my clay feels like Very Yes um animals in the blade because oh I've seen some of those there's one at the at the house where we're staying you see what he's doing T he cut out the little sheep a really small thing Tu Arizona and um and it's got a PO a parrot m mhm yeah the parrot design is cool mhm very pretty very nice and there's different inside like can do this and now we come to the studio of Diego VZ who is working on a very large pot today but before we get into his pot building let's look at the tools he uses here's Diego's toolbox and you can see some of the usual ma Ortiz tools like the hypodermic needle and what else has he got in here well you've got these knife blades these probably function just about the same as the hacksaw blades we looked at the sea and then he also has these spoon bowls spoons with the handles cut off which I imagine you could use inside the pot for scraping it and then he's got like a credit card that's been cut into a rounded shape and what else have we got in here oh the ubiquitous hacksaw blade and piece of PVC pipe which is seen all over mod artiz for rolling out slabs and some more spoons which are great for reaching down inside hard to reach places you can tell that Diego makes a lot of large jars cuz he's got some of the biggest pookies or moldes I've seen anywhere even in MO Ortiz look at the size of these also in Diego studio today is his Apprentice Alan Koo who's also building a pretty large jar today and so we'll go back and forth between the two of these as they build these jars Diego said the clay he was using today was wetter than he wanted and so he kept having trouble with it because it was wetter than he'd like I believe the wetness of his clay was the reason that he's using smaller than usual coils for aot Ortiz and also why he had to resort to a hair dryer to try to dry out this pot before he added more coil to [Applause] it eventually Diego and Alan had to break for lunch at that time I left to go explore other corners of monores and when I came back a few hours later the pots were done didn't they come out beautiful and our final Potters who are going to sh show us how they build pots is Miguel and adelene again and you will see that they work together as an unbeatable team to crank out pots at a ridiculously fast rate they are the lightning Potters El aleros relampagos fore foree speech okay I want almost foreign spee spee you [Music] listoe the total build time for these two pots that they built together was less than 17 minutes I wasn't kidding when I called them the lightning pows [Music] we had some trouble getting to ma Ortiz so when you cross the border and you're going more than 16 miles from the border then there's certain paperwork you have to do one piece of paperwork is like a tourist visa that you have to get for yourself permission for yourself to visit deeper into Mexico and the second is if you're driving a vehicle you have to get a pass to drive that vehicle down into Mexico and you put up a bond for your vehicle that you get back when you go back across the border so when we went to get our tourist visas The Man Behind the Counter the official realized that our passports had expired we didn't know it because they last for like 10 years and so he said well your passport has expired and we thought we were going to have to cancel our whole trip and then he said I'm going to go ahead and give you these tourist visas but you need to get this taken care of before your next trip to Mexico and we said sure that's fine and we appreciated that and we went on our way then when we went to get our truck taken care of the P to get our truck down they looked at all the paperwork that was relevant for example um you know our registration and our insurance and all that and then she asked to see my passport and the first thing she did was notice that that passport rep was expired and she denied me entry so what were we supposed to do we almost drove home and then I said well look we still have permission to visit Mexico only our truck can't go if only we could get a ride from the border to ma Ortiz and so I talked to a friend of mine in MO Ortiz and we got somebody to take us down Louise and his wife Betty drove us from the border at palus uh Chihuahua there by Columbus New Mexico down to ma Ortiz for a fee and then when we got here well it's a pretty small VIs so we actually could have walked anywhere we needed to go but it would have taken some time but it gets even better when we got here somebody lent us a truck and so we had Wheels the whole time we were here and so that's the story of how I spent 5 days in Mexico on an expired passport I can see a little kid about 10 or 12 thinking this was the greatest thing ever now let's look into how they finish their pots in M Ortiz once the pots have been formed and allowed to dry a little bit you can pop them out of the Pooky or what they call a molde and start scraping the bottom you've always got that Mark where it sits in the mold at the bottom where there's a little lip a little Rim so you can see that Miguel here is just scraping that all off then scraping it down nice and smooth after that you let the pot dry fully then it's time to sand they do a lot of sanding in M Ortiz that's how they achieve that really lustrous polished finish so you can see Mary here she's got three kinds of sandpaper 80 grit 180 grit and 220 grit so she has to sand each pot three times with each grade of sandpaper to get it nice and smooth and that's before she starts polishing or painting so I don't have a lot of video of the sanding process because there's really not a lot lot to show just sanding the pot it's the most boring mundane task involved in making ma Ortiz Pottery once it's sanded you can get on to the polishing step which I promise is fascinating so here Veronica is applying oil to the sanded and dry pot in this case she's using Furniture oil but they use a lot of different kinds of oil here in M Ortiz after she's coated it in oil she waits a minute for it to draw and soak in not very long maybe a minute or two at most and then she applies water to that so here's a rag with water on it that she's you can see she just puts the water right on top of it and then again she kind of gives it a minute for that to soak in and not to have excess water on the surface you can see she uses this rag to buff off any excess water and then she begins polishing with a smooth stone and you can see the pottery develops a really beautiful almost mirror likee finish right away as she starts polishing for the fire like a a prefire sometimes we put it in there first like Gloria uses a similar process access to polish her large Oya but because it's so large she has to do it in stages so first of all she covers the entire pot with oil in this case she's using an oil that's made for treating leather on Saddles once the pot is entirely covered in oil she has to wait a few minutes for that oil to soak into the pot before she begins polishing to soak in mhm see yeah okay next she adds water but instead of covering the entire surface like Veronica did she covers just a small area that she can polish at one time and then moves on and does the pot in stages so using a sponge she just applies a little bit of water and then using a larger sponge she kind of helps dry it out and remove any excess before she starts polishing to start with she does sort of a rough polish using this engine push rod then once she's got that all covered she puts that aside and picks up a smooth Rock to do the final finished polish after that area is completely polished she picks up her sponge and water and wets a new area and begins the process over again in this way in stages she slowly Works her way around the entire pot [Laughter] now that's the one you put the diesel on the diesel Penta s Mangano e grafito no manganes bar e manganes see plain manganese that is a recipe I know well so in case you missed that exchange she first coated the pot in a liberal coat of diesel diesel fuel and I didn't catch that on camera but it's not a big deal she just coated it in diesel with using that sponge in the cup right there then she waited a couple minutes for for it to dry fully now she is applying a layer of Manganese and Clay mixed together with water and now she's applying that with a sponge all over the pot and so this is basically a slip uh I haven't seen a lot of slips used in MA Ortiz but this is a slip if it's just clay and manganese the interesting thing is she doesn't give it two coats she doesn't make it especially heavy I mean when she's done as you'll see you can still see through it quite a bit but it does give it a black Blackness and then she's going to add some more Blackness to it in a minute here MH see say again graphite yes [Music] see this is powdered graphite that they obtain commercially somewhere so she's adding this to the container and she's going to mix it up with diesel so in this little I think it's a gatorade bottle she has some diesel fuel so she mixes the graphite with the diesel and then this gets applied to the pot over the top of that manganes and Clay slip that was already [Music] added wow look at that look at it just comes alive wow amazing I got manganese as the base layer and then that graphite over the top I just mix the graphite and together coat once this step is completed they wait at least another 20 minutes for it to dry fully before they start polishing it I'm on the side of the road near kasas Grandes Chihuahua and if there's one thing I know what to look for what looks like and that is a clay Quarry so there's a spot on the side of the road here that's all dug out in this bank now I was looking for clay I was thinking about clay when I was down here all the ground around here is that reddish brown color looks nothing like the color of rl's polychrome so I thought kept thinking where is that stuff coming from and Crossing this little Hill and this whole bank is dug out Potters have been in here digging Potters have been here digging recently you can even see like marks you know where where a tool a pick or something has been working so pretty cool it's easy to find these little spots when you're looking for it where somebody's been digging and then sto and it's a you know it's a good sign that there's clay anyways pretty interesting white it's definitely clay too you can see by the texture of it little bit crackly angular chunks it's also very very ashy but um it's definitely clay interesting stuff this has to be I mean may not be the exact Source but it something like this that they were using for ramal polychrome interesting having collected a bag of this clay I took it back to my lodging in MA Ortiz and ran a little test on it I put it in a container put some water on top of it so I could see how much clay was in it I let it soak for a few hours and then kind of just ran it through my fingers to see what the texture was like and the results are it definitely has a lot of clay in it but it also has a lot of grit in it the way they process clay here at M Ortiz would definitely clean this up and make it usable how usable I had no way of saying I would have loved to have taken the whole bag of clay home with me but the Customs will not allow raw unprocessed clay across the border it has to be processed and I did not have time in the few days I had left of my trip to process a whole bag of clay so I left it in MA Ortiz but the big takeaway for me being a replica Ator was that I had found a whsh clay near the ruins of pime which you know to me is important or a big deal so I found this corn grinder there similar to what I use for grinding clay except they don't use it to grind clay they don't dry process their clay they use the corn grinder to make paint so this is the native manganese that they use here they gr it up they mix it with clay and I don't know if there's other ingredients or not I really don't know but they make paint themselves out of natural manganese that they harvest in the local area and that is really the foundation for their fine painting the other thing that's important for their painting are these brushes they make these brushes themselves from the hair of small children so very small children have super fine hair that makes the finest brushes for painting all the Potters that I observe painting in mod Ortiz were all using these these handmade children's hair brushes now let's look at an example of these brushes and this paint being used together here's Sabino and he's about to start painting that plate that we saw Veronica polishing [Music] recently [Music] okay to M see yeah manganese see mango she very fast I paint much slower than that mhm scrapes it off yeah uhhuh I think if I did that with my paint I would smear it all over the pot the soap keeps it from smearing see no uhh Jose and Celia are two artists in MA Ortiz that do the very fine detailed painting on pots as you can see here this kind of painting takes hours to complete but the results speak for themselves now you might notice that the color of the clay body is black this isn't a slip it's actually made with black clay and the reason is they add manganese right to the clay which is a pretty neat idea on the other hand manganese is toxic to inhale so think about these pots when they sand them there's manganese in the air you would want to have a good respirator or you know maybe not even be around when one of these manganese pots is being sanded but they paint on this black clay with bright colors in this case red and white but in other cases they use commercial underglazes on some of these so you'll see blues and greens and yellows and colors that are not natural occurring but it really makes a striking beautiful pot with these bright colors on the black background these are finished pots that are dry and are waiting to be sanded and Polished and painted once the designs are outlined in the black manganese paint then in order to make the traditional kasus grandis polychrome in between those black lines is filled in with red paint as you see Veronica doing here now one Clay is make the paint red and it's yellow but when fire it's red mhm yes chain color like super smooth then we get pain so like and that that lubricates it so that so it doesn't scratch yes mhm the last common design technique in M Ortiz that we're going to look at today is scfo there is a surprising amount of beautiful scraffito work being done in MA Ortiz today and as you can see this pot was painted with commercial underglazes you don't get those blues and greens from natural materials and then she's scratching out around them which really provides more definition to the design and really makes them pop so how did the pottery making tradition get started in MA Ortiz in the first place well it's the same old story boy finds Pottery shirts boy falls in love with ancient Pottery boy decides he's going to try to recreate some of that Pottery boy's obsession with Pottery changes the course of his entire life it's happened to a lot of people I know people like John olssen and Tony sorz and even myself and it happened to a man named Juan Kaza who grew up in MA Ortiz and it said that in the 1950s while he was still a teenager he started to experiment with local Clays and minerals to try to reproduce the beautiful ancient kasas grandis pottery that was found in that area and with the way those kind of things go it took him a long time of experimentation and trial and error to get success but by the early 1970s he was creating convincing replicas of ancient kasus Grandes Pottery pots that he found a ready market for with collectors north of the Border Juan's success inspired others in the village to try Pottery he taught what he had learned to friends and family others began doing their own experiments with local Clays and minerals in 1976 an anthropologist named Spencer mcallum bought some of Juan's pottery from a junk store in Deming New Mexico he then traveled south into Hua trying to track down who had made the pots which led him to WAN kaz's doorstep the two men came to an agreement whereby Spencer would pay Juan to make pots this allowed Juan the freedom to experiment and improve in his craft without the economic pressure to have to make pots quickly in the 1980s the quality of the pottery coming out of M Ortiz increased rapidly as did the number of active Potters in the village it is estimated that by the late 1980s there were around 300 Potters at work in the village at the same time the notoriety of M Ortiz Pottery was rapidly increasing in the United States and more people began collecting it since that time the quality of the pottery made here has continued to improve and today there is Pottery being made in every corner of the village imagine being a young person growing up in a pottery making Village like ma Ortiz you would not need to go through all the experiments and trial and error that early Trailblazers like Juan Kaza had to do it's the same with the pottery making bubl in the United States there's always a family friend or an uncle or an aunt who is willing to teach you what you need to know to get started but for those of us interested in making traditional pottery who aren't in pottery making communities like that the road to progress can be winding and the learning curves steep this is the advantage of the ancient Potters Club it's like a virtual Village of more experienced Potters who are willing and able to help you make progress we meet together over Zoom every week to make pottery together and we post tips and questions via our Discord Community throughout the week I can be like your weird old pottery making Uncle who helps you out with your Pottery skills join the ancient Potters club and call me to Andy I'll put the link to that on the screen here and down in the duoo in case you're interested in learning more about the ancient Potter's Club Sabino is here this evening getting ready toight that beautiful plate that we saw in his Studio earlier in the day so this is what I would call the primary fire he's just getting everything warmed up and ready to go the oh so pretty oh no this one's different see he doesn't that one different yeah yeah like maybe this scho with that okay try thank you what do say gabri Gabriella am it might appear when you're watching the video that it's all happening pretty fast but these steps were spread out quite a bit so everything's warming up really slow so first they warmed up this metal tub for a while then they put the plate inside and they let that warm up for quite a while so now that you see them stacking the fuel the plate has already been in there for a bit and so it really has had a lot of time to preheat slowly in this fire before they start fueling it so the fuel here is is mostly cow manure but there are a few pieces of split Cottonwood added to it m nice good yeah see wi and then the cool down period is also equally long he lets it sit here even after he's removed the fuel from it he lets it sit here in the this tub for a long time before he opens it up now here's a look inside Sabino and Veronica studio just to see some of the pots that they made today all sitting here dry see that so they've had a very busy day now we let this cool with the lid on it for quite a while now he's taking the lid off he's still going to let it cool for a bit longer before he pulls it out of the tub so he's letting the cool down take place very slowly cuz he doesn't want to crack it so by the time he finally pulls it out it's after dark so the whole process took quite a while to complete slowly heating it up and slowly cooling it down very nice that's got the little heart in there very cool this is how I met Mary I was just driving down the road and I saw someone firing Pottery so I stopped and talked to them so this is a smudge fire for blackwar so you see this tray of horse manure here she probably put some of that under the sagger before she started the fire that way it kind of carbonizes it gets hot creates a smoky atmosphere in there and the pots underneath the sagger will be impregnated with that carbon turning them black and so you'll see that over the pots there's this big metal tub that's sitting right down on the ground that way no air can get in there cuz she's trying to smudge the pots and now she's just letting it cool down real slow so once the fires burned to coals she pulls those coals away and then she leaves it for quite a few minutes to just sit there and cool down on its own slowly then she'll come over she'll pull the Dirt away and then she'll leave it sit and cool some more just trying to prevent that thermal Shock by letting it cool down nice and slow and finally once she thinks it's cooled down enough she'll get two pieces of Firwood and lift that sagger off and we can finally see the beautiful black Pottery underneath [Music] I really I drink the kind of diet usually so it's it's [Music] my [Music] we've been really fortunate in that the weather during our trip was actually really good which you know for a trip in January it can be really hit and miss uh as you can see it's raining today but we've had four really beautiful days and so today is the day that we're getting ready to go we've made some really great friends here the people in this Village have been so warm and welcoming and kind they've taken us into their homes they fed us they' given us things theyve just made us feel welcome today Louis is on his way down here he's going to pick us up and drive us back to the Border if you enjoyed this video about how they make pottery here in M Ortiz I've done other videos having to do with how different groups in the southwest make pottery so you might enjoy this one over here about how the hopes make pottery I appreciate you coming on our trip with us today we'll catch you next time

Channel: Andy Ward's Ancient Pottery

Views: 285,208

Keywords: pottery, clay, coil pot, coil pottery, primitive pottery, hand built pottery, southwest pottery, traditional pottery, andy ward, hand building pottery, coiled pot, coiled pottery, wild clay, mata ortiz, mexican pottery

Id: rtFTd8UIaDw

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024