How to create and use terra sigillata on pottery

so my name is Mira for those who don't know me I'm sure you've seen my face just didn't know my name I come to the Thursday morning pottery class with curry and I should thank everybody that's here that's not here that has taken me through this journey pushing me probably to actually take the independent study and finish it so I called my study terrace a gelato if you all want to say the word once terrace a gelato everybody looks at me and goes Tara what so Tara say gelato and I called it exploring methods to amplify tactility with traditional technique where the traditional technique is the use of Tara such that's what we're going to call it from now and I worked on the independent study from the session that ran may/june and then I completed school was done and so I completed my study through June and some of July and some of August so I'm not going to take too much time describing to us age but we want to know what it is that we are talking about when we say that our such it is not a technique of today it dates back almost 6,000 years and I will just run through very briefly on the history of terrace which beginning with what the word itself means Tara we all know from terracotta that it has to do something with earth okay and sigil Lata means seal but it does not mean sealing as in sealing a surface with something but rather from sorry I wanted to show everything big I don't know how much you can see from the picture here it has an embossed surface so of the kind of seal that the Kings would have used when they had to emboss their seal from their ring those official kind of seals so it simply means the use of clay to produce surfaces which have an embossed nature to them and with my next few slides I'll show you how terror such progressed beginning from the Greeks then the Egyptians and then the girls that's all that I'll quickly run through it so what I say here is 4500 BC Egyptians used carbon to create the color black so we have to think of very basic use of earth the clay and fire and what colors can be produced from that one basic color was black so they used carbon to produce black we all know that and then came the Minoans in about 3000 BC and they used manganese for black so Alderley there was this progress happening and then the Greeks they worked a lot on terror search and they were able to figure out this technique where they played with fire and the presence of the absence of oxygen to create red and black and then around thousand BC to about 400 AD the routine and the same Ian where they which is all of Gaul and Italy that is where T s where Terrace edge where saw its glorious days several pigments were used to produce more than two colors including yellows and oranges and reds and blacks at the same time when one part was firing and then as we know now from pottery from Peru from Southern Southern America Peru or the Aztecs or Mexico the where that comes from there all that is the more contemporary styles that have evolved from 6,000 years now and one notable thing is that the word terror so gelato was first used or mentioned within the United States not until 1908 so just a few examples of how how good they were at the technique of using low fire to create probably two colors only but these words have stood the test of time and they are so good-looking so we have the obeyed civilization which is between 6500 or should I say 6500 like you guys say to 4800 BC which is present-day Iran and I have two parts here to show you where they were able to use geometric patterns with much ease and then they could also do their abstract animal form then we move on to another civilization which is the Egyptians 3200 BC and this part here I believe to get the two-tone what they did was they smothered just the top the rest was protected by sand to get the carbon to act on only one portion of the pot thereby giving them two colors and then came the Greeks who got really really good at this where they did the process of reduction to create black rhinox ID whereas if that reduction did not happen completely anyway there was uneven reduction you saw red so they figure that out and soon enough they were able to create more than two colors in one firing by first reducing and then oxidizing either ways whichever ways they did it and it is said that they used on their on the outside of their way and the kind of clay they used was in had a high content of fine oxide iron in it and that's what helped during the reduction and the oxidation process and then we come to the minerals they lived so that is kind of Europe Italy and all that and down there is the island of Crete that's where they lived they flourished and they were here between 2014 50 BC and they were able to create more than two colors they were able to create yellows oranges reds blacks and white on their way for black they used manganese for the white they used the clay body itself a kaolin clay which is a plasticy clay and the reddish orange is from iron oxide and then slowly as time progressed the Etruscan wear came by which was made by the Greeks and this was around 575 to 550 BC this particular cup and I don't know how much you can see from there but you can see that it gleams kind of blackish silver and this where came out when silver ware in its true pure form which is black and shiny not white and shiny like we know it now hit the market and the Potters were trying to make pottery to kind of look like it because not everybody could buy silver so you could still buy something that looked like it and so this was probably the height of their production where they made these shiny black ware and then between the first and the second century AD that is probably Terrace edge at its best you see how glossy the surface is very very very refined clay was used and pottery was very durable it was low fired and this was the best time for terrace edge in the world and then slowly it went out of vogue metals came in in pottery ware was not considered as important anymore exciting anymore I guess so that's when the world forgot how to do this anymore so a lot of research came up in the early 1900s now I should say the early 1800s to figure out how the Greek where looked so glassy what did they do they thought it was some kind of a slip or a glyph that they used but it took about a hundred years or more or even a century maybe to figure out the exact recipe of how terrace edge was made so I'm just going to tell you a few things as few people that were important during this discovery so 1858 Samuel birch he was a British Egyptologist and antiquarian who started studying a lot about all these different wares from early Minoans or even further down to what we know what they knew till then and he put it together in a book and then came Karl Fischer from Bavaria who discovers terraces in 1908 he discovers it he describes it and they are still calling it probably a slip or a glace then comes Theodor Schumann a scientist in Germany and the war is happening and through the years of the second war he finally discovers how to make terraces from highly refined clay and then in the US Joseph which Noble he writes several books he is basically just a self trained ceramic archaeologist and in 1965 he writes a book on the technique to recreate terraces which is also published from there the word terrorist appears the different recipes appear and people are trying the research on there where again so for my study I had asked Patrick to help me out with finding somebody who knew a lot about Terrace H and Pete Pennell was one person that he had just recently heard at and seek a conference in January I think and Patrick wrote to him and Pete Pannell sent me his entire talk which spent about an hour and what I don't know how long have I been talking hopefully not too long and he goes through this entire history with images and this and that and whatnot it's like one whole big hour that he talks which I tried to concise in five minutes that is peepin else teapot and like it says your it is a it is red earthenware and it it has been brushed with Terra siege and he gives it a patina finish he makes a patina with one part of ghostly berate and one part of colorant and then it's a thin wash over a bisque we're not like how I would be talking to you more about how I do my Terrace edge on my green where when it is bone-dry so the patina itself goes on the best width and that tends to show your textures very well I believe so I thank ppl for all his guidance through his emails and his talk this is basically Pete - terraces recipe I can give all of you a copy I had requested that we make a few copies of the terraces recipe so anybody that's interested can walk home with one it sounds all very misty key and difficult but the more I jumped into it it was easy it just took time and a little effort so basically it's just water and clay you could use any clay but from what the discussions we have had Patrick and me he said plastic ek clays or what ball clays that's what they call are more suitable for terror such then some other clays which have a lot of grit in them and other things added so you have water to clay two parts to one part and then what do you do here comes the main the most important part of making your terror stage which makes it work so the clay particles are all held together they're all holding on to each other for dear life and you add a D flocculent what we use here in the studio that we have is sodium silicate it's like a thick viscous liquid we even used it one day to create a very different technique in the Thursday morning class if you remember so you add a tiny bit literally it was a tiny bit maybe what a teaspoon maybe into the water and the D flocculent comes by and now attacks every part of this clay body and separates out each particle in it into its finest size micron sizes now all the clay particles are in big small medium small smallest sizes and what happens naturally when something like that happens in our solution is that the biggest particles want to go down and that's what happens the d flocculation happens where all the big particles start settling down sometimes you need about two days for the entire D flocculation to happen and you have your thinnest smallest particles on the surface and you can see this separation of layers so you let it settle literally you let it settle don't touch it don't keep it where there will be a vacuum running a whole day or a AC running a whole day literally keep it where nobody will come by nobody walking children won't be jumping I thought of all these things and then you siphon off the top without disturbing the bottom you do not want any of that bottom because those are big particles and if you have any of the big particles in your terror stage then when you burnish the sheen will not happen because you have big particles and then you have tiny particles they don't like to be on the same surface then this is your Terrace edge sadly you have to throw off the rest of the sludge that bothers me till date I'm still trying to find out what can be done with the sludge and then you measure the specific gravity that is the critical thing to do to see if you will get a good Sheen when you burnish your pot after having applied terror such measuring it is a very neat and easy technique you just measure 100 grams of water on a really sensitive scale mark how far the the waters sad dump it off and add your Terrace edge just until that mark the number you get is divided by the weight of water and if you get anywhere between 1.15 you did it so I did I won't say I got 1.15 mine was around 1.2 1 so I added little water sometimes if it was too thick if it was too thin I let it evaporate for another one day hoping the specific gravity will increase I did ok I would say and then you apply two or three coats on your green ware and then you burnish it it's your bone dry green where you would wonder how you could do that and then polish it how does it not break it surprised me too I was hugging it and I was polishing it but it didn't break on me so it's interesting how this works I did a few just to see if it work and if it will work on risk and I asked you to use it on your chickens also the other day yes yes so this is just pictorial yes there would have been bigger pictures I'm sorry so that is the water that has been measured there's a mark right here the D flocculent is being added to the water and mixed well and then slowly you add your clay in slowly and you give the clay time to kind of absorb into the water and settle then it begins to settle you would have seen lines running through if if you had seen a bigger picture which means the D flocculation has started and then you see two separate layers here I don't know how much you can see there's one one layer here and a clearer layer on top the top is what we need so you siphon off the top without getting any of the bottom sludge and then you apply three coats put your part on a wheel slow speed and start brushing it off from top to bottom run your other finger on the top as the terrace edge is drying slowly it should neither be wet nor should it change color and become white if it becomes too white you cannot Sheen it if it's too wet it will stick on your finger so test it with your finger if it's not sticking on if it still looks gray but is not shiny and wet it's the right time to Sheen it with a plastic bag grocery bag with this part of your hand with simply your fingers some people use the back of a spoon some people use a stone come up with any number of ideas everybody has their way and that's what it looks like after three coats it's being burnished and it's nice and shiny ready to go for a firing some people do it this way some people do it that way I had through all my readings I see that either ways it works the idea is not to let it dry out because then you can't burnish you have to go with another layer of the rough edge on it and then shine it I everything that's out there it's from our kills so no reduction sadly and it is Oh six and then fired back to six if I added our clear glaze so if I did not some of the pieces did not go through the second glaze burning so which means I'm I'm not still low range because oh six is not considered low oh four or two people do all that machine is lost 50% that's the only thing so if you don't mind losing machine yes you can food safe so these are my colorants so me and Patrick we started out making two batches one with om for clay which is a ball clay we use here and the xxxx agar clay which is also a ball clay so I started with two different ball players just to just for fun to see if they would react differently work differently for me my favorite seems to be the xxxx agar Patrick I don't know if I ever told you and I added four green this doesn't look green it looks green on the first firing till oh six but cone six changes the green to a kind of tannish brown which is still pretty and Patrick tells me if I add more green chrome oxide it will stay green I did not get to that point but that would be something I'll try in the future and that like it looks is black so in my Terrace H 1 cup of terraces I add black Mason stain as simple as that the same black Mason stain we used for making our black slips correct Patrick yes literally for a cup of Terrace which I added a teaspoon the only difficult part with making these colorings is that the terrace which is such fine particles of clay and the Mason stain or the oxides or the carbonates you add are big particles and they don't want to go into solution so with each sample I made I had to use the immersion blender several times to keep it in solution sometimes if I had gone if I was gone for two days and I came back they would all settle on the bottom I would have to do the immersion blender thing again there is something you can add we gum see to the terrace edge if you want your colorant to stay in solution I have not tried that out yet then I tried our two colors which we did not carry in the studio a teal and all my samples are out there also if you want to pass it around do you see the sample of Tolerance yeah yeah and the teal is is a pretty color I like it and the turquoise I think was a probably a big hit amongst everybody who looked at my pots these were two different mason stains we ordered and then to get a pure white terror such is not white it is off-white which is very nice but if you want pure white you add tin and then I have a purplish red I think Patrick has had better success with using the Crockers martes yes Krakus martyrs is what it's called and that added to your terrace which gives a reddish color I have not gotten it to be really red or purple it's still a dull orange for me and then a blue is the cobalt carbonate that we use in the studio as well which is a very pretty blue and then finally is my control as I call it which is the terrace edge itself so you can see the difference between the white and the terrace edge so now coming down to what I actually did so why I ended up looking into terror stage for my independent study is that I think in the last five six years that have been here without alliance I've always loved working with slips and then doing scruffy toe on it but there was something missing when I had I added glaze over it and I lost the warmth in the pot it was not making me completely happy and accidentally when I was trying to make these cups for a cousin of mine she wanted Aztec designs I was looking into Aztec designs into brushes how to make these intricate designs and all Lin who was sitting on the other side said you could use Terra said you know your things your texture will show through and I looked at her and like yes you can use their a serger on that she said yeah I said I thought it was only for aku no I was like really oh my god have I been missing out on this because we have those buckets sitting there quietly nobody even looks at them we have terrace which we have red art terraces which is a red coloured terrace aged in simple words but none of us actually use it and it's so easy and simple to use so that's where I said okay this is what I want to find out more about so I started the first things I did even before I started my independent study I was going to do the independent study but I had already started working with porcelain and I was loving it like many people said oh I hate porcelain I was loving it maybe because it was plastic more plastic than the other clays we use in the studio and I have always loved red earthenware what is it called what red is it called other than red right so I have always found it very easy to work with it so I made my first two pieces one with porcelain and one with Odin red and from my buckets of porcelain I took out some slip put it into a small bottle that I had just bought and I was able to do can you can somebody pass out the big earthen red bowl I was able to very usually easily use my slip my own slurry slip from my stinky bucket to do slip to do the slip work on the earth in red which was bone dry and then I said okay now let's try terraces on it and I did so I applied reddit terraces on it and I burnished it and it came up fabulous I was so excited the day it happened so if the big red bowl that's being passed around the slip that I've used if the porcelain slip and it is a earthen red part I have just one band of white not white terraces terraces on the outside the rest is covered with red art taro sage so I made my bowl let it dry then I did my slip trailing and in about five minutes it dries out - then I brushed several coats of the red art shined it and then played a little bit more on the other side to give it a white band so I have alternative red white red happening on the underside many people ask why did you know so much on the other side it should be on this side but I think that's the that that's when a potter is successful when a part of top flipped around and they look at what you did on the underside so unless you tell them you're a person who does the underside they're not going to look at the underside it's usually pick it up you know - the glaze on the inside and then back it goes so so I have whew yes it is yeah and we have it here the same it's been fired only one no it's only been fired one yes yes yes yes yes yeah I have two other pieces that I also did in the similar fashion they're also out there and there's a mug that I did which had cobalt carbonate on top and then I put the green chrome oxide on the bottom the first firing it looked blue and green but after that second firing it became blue the blue retains so that is good news for us blue and tan but I still love the tan it's out there too if anybody's interested so this was one method I used and then I went on that's the turquoise which is also there and then the second method that I tried was to do shellac resist because one day I stepped in and everybody in Saturday class was talking about what Ben had done and he had this beautiful tall picture that's been sitting there that got laced today so your spot is cleared for always and he done this geometric pattern and all he had done was shellac resist and wipe off oh my god that really excited me so I wanted to see what that would do for me with teres each side did so the first piece that went around that is shellac resist the yes this is shellac resist so you can feel the surface you see it's up and down so I drew my eye just went while drawing a design on it you like your design you stop and then you either shellac between your lines are outside your lines that's up to you then you wipe wipe wipe with a not a very corresponds and not a very fine sponge you want clear to come off so an in-between sponge have clean water squeeze out the water and gently wipe be careful you can break it and then feel the surface if you think you have enough depth good go on to the next so then I did two colors of Terra sage I did a red art terraces and the black terraces the only problem I had the only problem I had was I think I had given it too many whites so the shellac wasn't resisting the terrace which I was hoping to have a clean white surface with a red background that didn't happen terraces wanted to stick most of everywhere so I had to do a little bit of wiping off so that I would have a red and white pattern so I have to work on that but I found oh wait so instead of doing shellac resist on your bone dry and then painting it with Terra sage if you paint it with Terra sage make your design shellac it and then wipe off your design will stay with the terrace edge on your part so that is what I did with the this part here which is also out there I went the slipway I brushed several different colors of terrace which drew a pattern and then wiped off and it's day the initial wait what did you guys do exactly yeah so that would be that would be oil-based okay maybe I wipe too much there okay so and the third technique was just trying to be contemporary and be one with everybody so I used Laura's Amoco under glazes on my bone-dry cups I used the under glaze to make all kinds of fun lines and I let it sit for about a week and then one day I came and used all my different colored Terris edges to fill in the spaces and then it went for firing and for one of them I used clear on the inside just to make it functional because that's that is my future goal to make Tara such parts functional without losing the warmth they have in them I don't want it to be glaze glaze so that's what I did all of these are porcelain clay bodies I use the Amoco black under glaze just to see if Terris edgewood in any way interact or make those lines hazy but nothing happens because this is just clear it's not going to bother under glaze it's not glaze that it's going to react with so and then I filled it with the colored terraces everywhere at the bone-dry stage and then the insides are red because I brushed with red art and I fired them once this has been fired twice they're also out there for you to take a look at it is always food safe so all the wear that I showed you from years back centuries back we're always used as a wine something for liquids mostly so they have always been food safe there is no addition of lead anywhere so I wouldn't there's no reason to think they are not food safe right Patrick clay is always going to be somewhat in the finished form it may stain the piece may be more porous than any use of glaze but it's safe yeah that's my understand we all use glaze just because we want a teapot to be a teapot but if we think about Pippin else teapots it is terraces and it has a petite on the outside so it will hold liquids if not for 100 years for a day or two yeah yes that's what I think yeah yeah so so ever since I've been doing terrace edge which is not for very long to three months only summer makes the life feel very extended I think that's what I'm going through probably with two kids at home these are few inspirations that I I wish you could see these up big but I would like you guys to later come take a look at her work her name is sue me one day soon and she lives and teachers in Lakewood Colorado she does spit firing and Saget firing bit firing is where you use a pit to fire your items you use wood sawdust some people use coffee grounds bananas copper wires all of these gave different hues to the pot as the firing goes on and the pit fire doesn't take more than 30 minutes from start to finish and then you cool this is low fire basically and you could do reduction and oxidation both if you did a scigirl firing a sagar is nothing but a some form of an enclosure into which your part will be so that you deplete all the oxygen and you have reduction happening and you had sawdust for the carbon and all that wonderful stuff so coming back to her she makes these wonderful parts where she calls the sea cavalry it has like a sea horse on it and she called builds them like the olden days and but she burnished --is the pattern which is painted using Terra siege and then it is smoked fired so the part itself becomes completely back the Terrace Edge has a greyish contrast on top of black shiny pot that's one more so you can see how she's playing with the reduction where you have these orange shoes and the rest is black she calls this portrait of the artist same thing Coyle built burnished patterns painted with their Asajj and smoke fired and one more person that I've been really inspired is Michael Eisner I don't know why something about Colorado and the Southwest I think there is something that there is that they always bump into these beautiful techniques of the olden days and he lives and his studio is also in Woody Creek Colorado that's him making these these days very recently making these beautiful he calls it patterns from nature and you guys should go look him up and see the most the wonderful work he's doing with just one or two tools like the end of a blade and he does repetative patterns on his parts he uses clay from where he lives he goes up the mountains digging for clay cleans it up and make these waves Michael why is now WI s NER this is what he was making probably five seven years ago but very recently this is the where he's making I'm sorry I can't show it to you big and the color of the clay he starts with is usually either white or tan and he uses the same techniques to make them look red or black he hides iron oxide to make them red or smokes them to make them black and these I think interest me more because they remind me of the the way from southern America and the middle one is all black because he uses graphite he uses powdered graphite that he then smears on his pots on his bone dry spots and then he paints them with Terra sage as well to get the double hue of grave on black and then the rest of course he makes his own he calls its lips I think his own slips to make red and black so so that's that's all that I was able to accomplish in a short period of time given that our session runs only eight weeks and when it is the end of school and when you had already committed to do something else at school which takes all your time this must this is how much I could achieve but I'm very happy without what I was able to achieve with with Patrick's help and I've annoyed him a lot over text because he said you could text me I've texted him a lot so thank you Patrick so what next I want to try reduction firing and sagger firing I want to see this beauty of red and black happening with such a simple control of oxygen I have also tried one piece of painting teres aged over a burnished part I need to go take a peek in the kiln room to see if it's out and I think patinas on this cinch would be a good idea for the studio itself to try just to accentuate the texture of that many people are able to create here it's it's not a difficult thing to do I would say and then I do want to unravel the art of kitchen kitchenware so that would be quite I don't know not hard there'll be a lot of reading up to do looking up to do maybe visiting places to see how you cook on a part you you get so used to throwing thinner and thinner and you've the truth take part now do you have the book do you have the book you've seen the book okay thank you so acknowledgments my family of course yes and are the lines everybody that's here not here Patrick thank you Liz thank you and many of the instructors I don't think any instructors are here yeah but many of them let me stay on during their class hours yeah yeah so thank you Liz I mentioned you already Patrick thank you for brainstorming sometimes and Pete Pennell for sharing his talk and his recipe letting us use his recipe by the way his recipes on any site everywhere on the internet everybody uses it he is that generous and my poetry friends from Thursday morning class woohoo and party yes I mean it you guys your love and encouragement kept me going and the few websites that I took the pictures out of where ceramic arts network and ceramic arts daily for the for showing how to make terraces and that's it you [Applause]

Channel: Art Alliance GSO

Views: 4,966

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Keywords: art alliance greensboro, art alliance, terra sigillata, pottery with terra sigillat, how to make terra sigillat, how to make colored slips for pottery, pottery terra sigillata

Id: h-lAg9-iGMs

Length: 42min 22sec (2542 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 27 2018