Michael Hunt and Naomi Dalglish of Bandana Pottery - Walter Gropius Master Artist Ceramic Symposium

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah so here is a vein of the primary kale and you could see there's still some quartz and mica in it that did not decompose but the feldspar has decomposed to become kaolin so after we dig the kaolin we add water to the bucket to slake it and right now we're going to mix it up and get it ready to screen it so we have this mortar mixer and this very fancy tool which is the lid to the five gallon bucket with a hole in it so that we can put it around the border mixer then so we've made the kalen into a slip and we'll run it through a screen and we have a couple of different size screens that we use and this one is the coarser one and we sort of work our way down from there and it may be that there's still kale and chunks left in here we'll have to see after we screen the liquid through because maybe i'll groom it up some more before cleaning the rest so after we screened the slip the kalen slip through a couple of different size screens the next thing we do is we ball mill it to make it finer and with using local materials a lot of what we're playing with is particle size so with the clay like how fine we screen it is really important how much coarse material we leave in there but since we're leaving a lot of coarse material in the clay we kind of like this slip layer for to be somewhat smooth and uniform to lightly veil that coarse clay on top of it so we ball mill it before mixing it up so the kalin's in here with balls and it's kind of um the jars as they spin around the balls fall and grind it up hi i'm naomi dalglish and my husband michael hunt and i together are bandanna pottery and i'm sorry that we can't be with you in person this weekend but hopefully instead you get to get a little taste of our studio here in bandana north carolina and i hope wherever you are that you're doing well today i'm excited to share with you one of my favorite ways of making pottery which is throwing off the hump on this korean style kick wheel and what is kind of unique about this wheel is that it's completely made of wood you can't really see the flywheel from where you are but it looks very much like the the wheel head up here which is just a solid piece of clay and so it's really easy to get the wheel going and kick it and it's also really easy to stop it and go the other way so what that means is when we're throwing it's also really easy to stop the wheel if you exert a lot of force on the clay so um there's a lot of different ways that we deal with that but we did purposefully choose this kind of wheel because we really love the kinds of pots that this wheel teaches us to make it not that you couldn't make similar pods on a different kind of wheel but because this wheel does stop so easily with a lot of pressure from your hands it's very responsive and it also requires that we use quite soft clay um and in some ways it's a little bit more of a mix between hand building and throwing which both of those things we really love to do so the first way that i get started um oh i'll show you how i wedged up this hump of clay because that's an important part of getting started so right now i'm preparing the hump of clay that i'm going to use to throw off the hump and i'm spiral wedging which is a really great way to wedge a larger piece of clay where really i'm just dealing with one little section of the clay at a time so it's just a little turn with each push down now one of the issues with throwing off the hump that people often have is spiral cracking at the bottom of the pot so the first thing that i'm going to do to try and alleviate that issue right now there's a spiral going like this through the hump of the clay so if i were to set it on the wheel like this and throw that spiral would be kind of remembered in the body of the clay so [Music] what i'll do is just give it a slight turn and then just kind of try and quickly get it into that hump shape again um without setting a new spiral in there but now that i have this hump of clay on the wheel i will start to center it by slapping it i'm actually kind of going in the opposite direction that i will be throwing but this is just a way to sort of quickly get the clay towards center without it's a little bit easier in this first part just generally getting it there then throwing with water and then once you start actually throwing i'll start at the bottom but really only need to really center the top of this hump the what i'll actually be using for the for the first pot that i make and what the the main pot that i'm going to be showing you is um right here which is an animal jar and it's got two it's kind of like two bowls basically that fit together as a jar this bottom part has a flange and then the top part there goes upside down like that and we'll put an animal on top now one thing that i spoke about a little bit while i was making the wedging up the hump of the clay is how we can get spiral cracks um when we're throwing off the hump that's something that people often run into and part another part of the problem or the part of that reason that that could happen is that when we're throwing with a ball of clay on a wheel head we've got this hard surface of the wheel head to help compress against our hands as we're pressing down into it when you're throwing off the hump you just have the soft clay underneath so the best way that you can sort of approximate getting as much of that compression in there as possible um i'll push in with my fingers right here while i'm pushing down with my thumbs so that kind of motion is getting that compression as best as we can and in this first poll start to get the general shape of the bottom of this animal jar so one of the things that's really enjoyable about using this kind of wheel it's going slower and it's a little bit easier in a way to sort of catch what's happening along the way we're really um excited about the kinds of soft just wide sometimes irregular gestures that can happen in the soft clay as the wheel is is turning slowly so what i'll do before i get any further i've pretty much done my first pull and the whole wall of this pot is still pretty thick really any pot that i'm throwing after my first pull i'll deal with the rim because the rim is such an important part of sort of extend articulating what the pot is about this part the rim for this part of this pot is going to be the flange so this chamois is helping me to deal with all the different angles that i have in the flange here which is this flat spot right here for the lid to sit on and then the flange sticks up in the middle and then also a little bit of the outside of the pot there if i wait if i get the pot exactly where i want it and then i go oh wait i need to put the flange on there it's a lot harder because this move is definitely you know put some torque on the pot so it's nice if you have a lot of like strength and structure underneath there um just right after the first pull and then now i can go in and thin the walls a little bit and get some more of the throwing lines and form i tend to use pretty broad sections of my fingers while i'm throwing that can be something that's really interesting to mess around with um these tools are so amazing you've got like skinny points of contact and wider points like on my inside hand i'm often using this part of my finger and i'll use this wooden rib to again compress the inside um when i come in through here i'm pressing down and compressing the bottom but also getting some nice throwing gestures on the inside of the pot all right well that's pretty close to what i want the bottom to look like well let me just fix this flange a little bit more and i use the calipers to measure how the lid will fit and in this case there's different places that you could measure to compare the lid to what i'm going to do is actually measure the outside edge sometimes it can be really useful to measure this edge the outside edge of the flange but with this pot right here it's so important to me that the lid continues the form of the bottom that that's the part that i'm gonna measure and then later on after they've stiffened up and i'm gonna cut the foot and and trim the top there i can uh if it turns out the lid isn't fitting perfectly sometimes you can kind of get in there and do some tricksy things to help the flange come out a little more or cut a little bit away from the inside of the lid um so i'll just make a mark where i cut well where i'll cut that off and i'll do the lid next and this is actually how i really like to throw these jars as you can see on this side of me i've got a couple of words already going and they're all kind of different sizes and shapes and proportions and so rather than throw like a whole board of bottoms and then throw a whole board of lids i kind of like doing it sort of individually like this so along the way i can say oh might be interesting if i make this a little taller and maybe it will have a lid with an angle change or maybe it'll you know continue this spherical shape so even though right now um it's probably a little bit hard to tell that these are all different shapes um they all have slightly different proportions and the lids are pretty different actually so i um i think that's pretty fun and i for me working in series is really helpful um that's for that's the way that i sort of most naturally generate ideas is just to kind of get started doing it and in the doing of it i'll just get those little questions like hmm that was an interesting mark that accidentally happened on that one what's a way that i could incorporate something like that into a form that like even brings that out a little more or um sometimes when once i have a couple of boards of these i might even play with putting a lid that i thought was gonna go on one jar on another one um that tends to be my method i mean i'll look at pots that i'm interested in to get ideas and sometimes sketch but for me it is a lot more um it feels like a sort of natural evolution to just sort of see where things go and and continue along with little gradual changes along the way so this is gonna be this kind of lid though that's basically just like an upside down bowl so i'm opening and compressing kind of at the same time here so many really cool things to explore while you're throwing in this way i think it's it's there's something just very immediate about it i don't have to decide beforehand even if i'm gonna make a small pot or a big pot or maybe i'll make a big pot and then a small pot and sometimes some of the coolest pots are made when there's just like this tiny little bit at the bottom that's like not quite big enough to make what i was making before so i just make something really weird and then sometimes that's the best pot i made that day [Music] this part is a little tricky trying to get the i'm trying to get the lid to be the right size on the outside here i'm measuring this outside dimension but i'm also [Music] looking at this and trying to imagine that it's upside down and on top of that pot over there that i already threw because i really want the i want them i want there to be a sense of like a unified volume that it's that's being contained by both pots yeah it didn't go too far it's always a little bit easier to have it be too small and just let it out a little bit more than if it goes too far to bring it back in both technically and also because there's something about the clay that kind of remembers being out this far and even if you get it back in it might after it you know has sat on the board overnight be like i'm going back to where it was before and then your lid doesn't fit or after the firing so let's see if i keep can that way all right that's good i'm gonna cut that off so i'm gonna i'll go ahead and make another jar that is a slightly different shape um this one will have more straight sides and then i'll do an angle change in the lid so i have to kick kind of a lot at the beginning when i'm centering it's not like a a kick wheel that has a high momentum like a cement flywheel where you kick it and then it kind of keeps going it really does just kind of want to stop but at this point it's really what i'm used to and it's kind of nice i feel like it has sort of naturally as i'm kicking sort of towards the beginning of a pole um it has a little bit more force and then as i get up towards the rim where i might want to be a little bit more delicate it naturally slows down and that's really pronounced like if you're throwing a plate or a big platter where it's going to be going faster as you get out towards the rim anyway just because of the diameter so people often ask how michael and i collaborate in the studio because we do consider our pots to be one body of work and the answer is that we both really enjoy doing all parts of the process we both throw and hand build and decorate and glaze the pots and also a really important part of the process for us is um developing the materials and the the processes that we're using so we feel like those things also have a really dramatic influence on the way these pots are coming out um our pots a lot are a lot about like this dark wild clay that we have that's layered with light slips and transparent ash glazes in the wood kiln and so even while we're starting to make the pots we're thinking about what kinds of things we're doing that are going to sort of reveal those qualities of the materials so in a lot of ways we think about it as a collaboration between ourselves and the materials and the kiln but we do also um sort of freely copy from each other or riff on something that one of us made i think michael's gonna be showing you um a really fun carving technique that he uses to carve from a solid piece of clay and that partly came about because i was making some smaller animal boxes that i was also just making from a solid piece of clay and then cutting off cutting in half and scooping out the inside to make it into a box and he was noticing how much he liked the quality of that carving on the inside and um started messing around with that with um making different kinds of pots then also sometimes we decorate each other's pots there's certain decorations that one or the other or the other of us tend to do and so if i make a pot that i think would be really nice with some of the um brushy slip decorations that michael does really well i'll hand those over to him and he often hands pots over to me to do a kind of wax resistant iron wash decoration that i tend to do so some of our pots are made from start to finish by one or the other or the other of us and then some of them actually have been worked on by both of us [Music] i'll do the lid on this one since this uh lid will have an angle change it'll sort of take advantage of something that can also be a really interesting way to think about the clay if while you're throwing i think that this happens maybe a little bit more naturally if you're hand building and things aren't in the round but um something that we really like to think about in pots is the the expressiveness the the possibility for expressiveness in the clay wall it doesn't necessarily have to be the whole like often when we first learn to throw we sort of throw a cylinder that's even from bottom to top and then you make a silhouette with that clay wall you're sort of drawing with that uniform clay wall but sometimes the inside of a pot calls for different lines than the outside like in this pot right here i want an angle change so i just left this little ridge of clay there on the on the outside and this is a lid so in some ways maybe it's not as important as a bowl where i would really feel like i really wanted there to be a beautiful inviting curve along the whole inside even if i wanted to have an angle change on the outside but you know even though this is a lid that's going to be upside down most of its life i still want it to be nice on the inside here so now i think this is probably still very small but that ridge that i left there is giving me plenty of clay to keep that nice angle change and there isn't really a corner so much right inside here well i still have a little ways to go with this one maybe being a little too cautious i'm also paying attention to the thickness here of this wall um in relationship to how much space i left there on the lid seat for the lid all right i'm getting close i'll do one more it's nice to think about every space that we're creating in the pot as being an inviting space for our sort of brains to inhabit when we look at the pot so we also you know like to think about these kinds of considerations for the inside of a foot or the inside of a of a lid that that isn't even really going to hold anything except for our sort of psychological space there's something pleasing when when all of those details are tended to all right so after these have set up and gotten leather hard i'll be able to cut the the feet and the lids and that'll be sort of the moment of truth to see how good a job i did fitting them together and both in terms of the lid fit and the form and that is just going to be a factor of how long it takes these to dry [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right my uh jars are ready to cut the feet on it took a couple of days because it's been kind of rainy here but um i've got some here that where we've got the bottom and the top and they fit together pretty well so that's always good when that happens i'll start with the lid here michael and i often like to call this part of the process cutting the foot rather than trimming well actually right now i'm working on the lid but um this is in a lot of ways um you know sort of the second half of the process it's not really just the trimming away of excess clay but an opportunity to help shape the pot in a reductive way when i was throwing i was creating the sort of positive form and really playing with the softness of the clay and now i get to create a little bit of structure by the the marks that the tool makes when it cuts the clay away and also the texture that it reveals in the clay we have a really our um the clay that we use is a mixture of a couple of different dark local clays that have a lot of really wonderful coarse particles in them and that really gets revealed and emphasized when we cut into the clay so this is a really important part of the process for us and a really fun part and it's really important to do it when the clay is at the right consistency actually all along the way we really pay attention to that sometimes we sort of joke that our jobs are sort of moisture management because when i first started throwing i wanted the clay to be soft enough uh to really express the softness of the clay and now this part of cutting the clay away can happen really easily if it's at the right um consistency or it can be really challenging if it's too soft or too hard i'm just gonna kind of check and see if this is that's a good thickness and i like these cutting planes that have been created there um they have these slightly concave uh marks and that kind of creates some nice structure to the to the form there it's generally round well i'll show what it looks like when we get the bottom done too tapping on center is uh one of those skills kind of like riding a bike that is almost impossible to really explain how you do but i really recommend it as something to take some time to learn because it really opens up the possibilities of how you can you know work on cutting your feet and something that i learned by just one summer just sort of deciding okay i'm going to learn how to do this and every morning that i came to the wheel i had a coffee can that was filled with sand and i just spent like five minutes before i started throwing just practicing and then by the end of the summer i kind of got the hang of it so just sort of a little sometimes it's fun to have little uh drills that you can do like that just to get focused and to learn a skill and since we do pretty um you know kind of dramatic cutting with the tool it's i find it really helpful to put these lugs of clay on there that really hold it onto the onto the wheel so that i can get in there with the tool as much as i want to when i was throwing i had to imagine what the lid would look like when it was right side up or upside down and now i've got to imagine what the bottom of this jar is going to look like this kind of foot is sometimes we call it a footless foot it's going to have a foot ring on the inside which this is a really important thing when you're throwing off the hump as well we mostly throw pots that need to have feet because this cutting process is also compressing the bottom that was something that i was talking about while i was throwing the pot is trying to compress the bottom as much as possible and now i'm coming back in and compressing it from this side so yep i'm getting close it's always good to stop periodically and give it a little push and see how it's going there so just gonna fine tune this form the inside of the foot again is a really great place to take the form into consideration i'm wanting to help compress the bottom of the pot and also i want this to be an inviting visual space to inhabit when somebody turns the pot over so this is in general a little bit you know it's reflecting the shape of the inside of the pot but it's also kind of opening um to sort of help receive the eye and there's not any um like dramatic corners or undercuts that you could kind of get stuck in or that don't really reflect the outside shape and the other thing that i'm looking at here on the outside is you know this is a really round shape so i want to retain a sense of volume but it's important to have just a little bit of um sort of a concave line or reverse curve right at the bottom that sort of helps lift the pot up off the table if you have a lot of volume just right at the bottom where the pot is meeting the surface of the table then it can have kind of a saggy feeling so this pot i want to have a very expansive volume but to also feel like it's um visually not not sagging or or too heavy so let's see how this looks sometimes i'll take it off the wheel and then put it back on but i'm liking that and there's the the lid on there so they're both kind of working together pretty nicely i think sort of containing that like really round volume and then the next thing that i'll do for for this pot is to make the knob uh make an animal to put on top all right so i'm going to make an animal to be the knob on this jar maybe i'll make it of course and i really enjoy um making these i think it's really fun and um this is a place where i get to sort of explore again the kind of like softness and sometimes quick gestural pinching of the clay and i think that making animals using animals and decorations or forms can be a really uh can be really fun and interesting way to add uh you know add interest to a pot but it can be also perilous in my opinion because for me i'm not so interested in making something that um is just cute or like only sort of says something about the content which is the fact right now this is a horse but to me what's really important is how it's a horse like what sort of formal aesthetic function is it serving and what is it you know saying about the clay or how it was made um and i think that something that's kind of interesting is often you know animals are something that we all recognize and it might be the first thing that we sort of notice about a pot it's had there it's such a strong recognizable component uh but it's i think it really needs to be it needs to go beyond just that so sometimes we kind of like to think about pottery being sort of a subversive art form where maybe somebody sees this horse and thinks oh i like horses and that they get the pot for that reason or a mug is something that you can put coffee in and that's like a very sort of approachable and recognizable use and those are great things but then our hope is that when someone has these pots in their house and hopefully gets to use them quite often that another relationship can form that is maybe even a little bit deeper um i like the way that these are sort of these kind of quickly pinched forms and the way that this uh the sort of shape of this horse is um coming up off the pot and then kind of flaring again that is it's sort of bringing a little bit of lift to the pot again and then like the negative space there underneath the the legs is something interesting so let's see i'm gonna attach it slipping and scoring [Music] and since this is a a knob that people will be using to pick up the lid i want to make sure i get that attached really nicely so there is the oh let's see when i look at it this way it's a little bit lopsided i better fix that all right there we go it's a horse jar um we make we like to make pots in a lot of different ways um we throw we hand build we alter we combine those things right now i'm going to show you a technique of carving a pot out of a solid piece of clay and it starts by pounding two big wedges of clay together and then i'll shape it with this tool to sort of get it ready um our daughters talk call this tool the punker and they kind of think it's a standard pottery tool so when we go and do workshops and things um you know at different studios they'll ask oh well where's your punker don't you have a pumper it's one of our favorite tools um so i'm just kind of getting this the size here roughly that i know i want this pot and then to cut this i'm going to use these these slab sticks and these are sticks that have notches and the different colors are different thicknesses so you you can this these particular sticks have four different sizes um and it's a really great way to make slabs they um they take up a lot less space than a slab roller in a studio and um yeah so for for making thin slabs i would put these on in every notch and just slice through but these are going to be thicker slabs for these carved trays so i'm going to use three notches at a time for this one so i put this in here slice through and move it down three notches nice faster move it down three more notches a little bit here um and for this demo i'm just going to set these aside so this will give me three of these okay move this over here so this carving out of solid wet clay um developed for us it's sort of one of the ways that we collaborate and work with work with each other and work with the clay naomi was making some carved animals and i just loved the clay character that the carving expressed and really wanted to make some trades this way and also i've always been in love with carved wooden bowls but i always thought like most of the time when we're cutting the clay it's in a leather hard state so i assumed okay if i'm going to make a big carved thing i'm going to be making like 80 reclaim but at some point i realized that i could do this wet and um you know so then most of the clay that's coming off of here just goes into the next pot and it's it's also really fun to carve into the wet clay so i'm just gonna this is gonna be a three section tray with three squares so i'm just kind of quickly doing the math here to you know make that and i think for us the reason we use do a lot of different methods throwing and hand building and you know molding things is part of it is you know to physically to sort of you we kind of joke that since we are using our bodies in a lot of different ways we're just being really thorough and we're just injuring our entire bodies um but you know in reality it's nice to sort of not be too repetitive and do a number of different um use your body in a lot of different ways but the other reason we like to work in a lot of different ways is we're so interested in the the character of the local clay that we dig from near our area and all the different methods of working sort of bring out different characters of the clayness of the clay so for this i'm just roughing out this brick and then i'm going to scoop three sections out so i have these tools here these tools are coat hangers that are bent and then stuck in the end of a broom handle and these coat hanger tools are really great because because it's this round cross section that's kind of thick instead of slicing the clay because it's wet if i slice it sometimes it wants to stick back together again but this round thick cross section allows me to scoop it and it really almost like plows the clay apart um so i'm just gonna scoop this out [Music] [Music] so right there i'm pretty close i was a little cautious and shallow in the first one here but um i can just keep scooping and you know this way there's so many even with this one method there's so many different clay characters that can be expressed i'm always kind of trying to pay attention of the marks that are made so you know one way would be to leave it with these scooped marks like this or i could do this and then smooth it with a rib or what i'm going to do on this one is i'm going to rough it out with this tool and then finish it with a cutting tool to kind of just articulate that shape this particular form is based on this amazing wooden bowl that we got that's it's a bread a sectioned wooden bread bowl and it's really where yeah that form like the car the carving character of it and the sections um just was so interesting architecturally and texturally and formally that it kind of drew us to that to making these so a lot of times we might start with a more kind of sculptural formal idea and you know then kind of figure out what we might use it for later sometimes we start with like food and they're like oh what what can what can we make to serve this in or what you know would be really nice but sometimes we start with a form and then kind of figure out how to use it later the um the sculptor asamu naguchi early on in his career he built um some playgrounds that were really abstract playgrounds and when he took it to the city council to have them built they said oh well what's this for it's not swings it's not a slide and he had this theory that he called non-descriptive play where his idea was like a swing sort of tells you in a way how to use it and a slide does also but if you have a something to play on that's a sculptural that's maybe not as specific of what it's for then it allows room for imagination and play in the use of that and we like to think i mean some of our things that we make are more specific but we like to think of our pots as a little bit sort of non-specific play it starts with us but then hopefully someone might use it in a way that we did not think about or intend and that's where like the collaboration continues so you know naomi and i are collaborating with the materials around us and we're collaborating with each other in the kiln but really the collaboration is kind of between us and the user because when the pots go into someone's home and they're putting food in them you know it becomes so interactive and collaborative so here's one of these um a triple section tray and now i'm gonna make a lot a slightly more complicated one so i'll set this aside here and um put this longer chunk of clay here [Music] you whenever we demonstrate this you know at workshops and things we always like to tell people like so we're using this technique to make a three section tray but it's really s the um the scope of what could happen with this technique is so broad so i would encourage you all to try this technique but not necessarily make a triple tray just try to think of a crazy shape [Music] okay so this is also going to be roughly rectangle so i'll use this straight edge to cut the edges but there's no reason that this you know technique has to be um straight lines it would lend its you know more organic shapes could really work [Music] also [Music] i think that you know talking about you know this form being inspired by these wooden bread bowls you know makes me think about you know where a lot of our ideas come from and i think for us you know we love historical pots so much that a lot of our pots are initially inspired by um historical pots and we're pretty like if we get excited about something like we see in a museum or something we often will um you know just start by making pots pretty similar to that we'll just copy it kind of and but we found that for us like if that initial sort of inspiration doesn't leave lead to sort of a deeper you know sort of abstract formal exploration we often then sort of might not continue with it so you know the things that we stick with are the things that um are not finished but are like the seeds of inspiration so here i'm creating a little bit of an arc this is going to be a section to tray that has a curve to it [Music] so here i'm just trying to make a start with a nice arc and i'm thinking about this curve you know how much does this curve um contain and how much does it offer so in a way it's a little bit more of a v curve most of the curve is happening here and then the edges are pretty straight to really have it sort of continue out into space [Music] start to just like when naomi was throwing the bowls i'm you know starting to think about how i'm going to d deal with the rim almost immediately rims are so important and you know equally with hand building as they are with throwing so in a way this is pretty similar i just start with a curve instead of a flat piece of flat and i can do sections in this also so there it's roughed out and then i can continue i'm going to really slope this edge to to be able to give the ends of this a lot of lift well what is a normal schedule of your day in the studio now that we're in a pandemic yeah it's hard to think about maybe that's not such a good question it's hard to think about normal well so naomi and i um we have two kids um two daughters and that we just fed cake so we could sneak down here to do this so our you know day often revolves around you know the school day so yeah i usually drive the kids to school and then you know when i get back we start our day in the studio and we have a full-time apprentice it's our apprenticeship is a two-year program um our current apprentice is nikki um palcik and so you know after school we get started in the morning and then and work in the morning and um be pre-pandemic we would then have a you know a studio lunch we would cook lunch and naomi and i and the apprentices you know i'll eat lunch together and that's a really good time to sort of talk about you know some of the sort of broader picture stuff you know we have a lot of great conversations kind of that might start by you know some of the pots we're using um i think like when in learning pots about making pots it's great to learn about making pots in the making but also like around around a table using pots is a great time to sort of think about learning about pots also and then then we make pots after lunch until it's time to pick up the kids from school naomi usually picks up the kids from school and um then i continue working with um our apprentice um you know until it's time to make dinner um and then we'll often you know come down and make pots after the kids are in bed sometimes or a lot of times for us that's our that's our office time um so so this pot um i ribbed instead of carving it's just bringing out a different texture and what's fun about that is it's supported all the way down with these straight walls so i can really push and shape it but then i'm going to go in after and do this undercut um so this mountain of clay can you see the mountain clay um that'll all just go get re-pugged and go into another pot so here's a slightly more formal version it has that little bit of an arc to it that gives it a little bit um more lift but it also feels more presentationy than this this is a little more casual or something now i'm gonna um cut the back of this pot so after i carve it i let it dry for a few days and so then then i can turn it over and so it kind of works just like throwing plates or bowls where i can do a certain amount of the carving wet just like throwing and then turn it over and do a certain amount of cutting when it's um when it's dry so you as you can see i got pretty close here but so it's really fun to cut you know we love cutting feet so much on round pots but it's fun cutting things that aren't also and um yeah it brings out a different texture so that's that so now you can see here in these two places i've got a lot of weight and one of the nice things about these pots is we like the weight to them but this would be like maybe a little bit excessive so i'm just going to cut on two little feet two little grooves where those v-shaped partitions are on the top with this technique the scooping the different shapes you know allows for a lot of different variation and exploration but there's also a lot of possibilities with the feet also of different shapes so here i have one groove in there and i'll do another one and really like a lot of these things our methods are you know really sort of reacting to the clay you know what is the local clay that we dig what is it good at you know and how are what are ways we can kind of pull the texture and pull the character you know out of the clay it's it's really interesting how the local clay that we use you know not only changes the work but it kind of changes us as makers can you lead us to places where we might not have gone otherwise so now that now our slip has been ball mill that's ready to go and we're getting ready to apply the slip to the pot and you since we're starting off with this dark local clay and we're adding white slip to it there's so many fun things that we can do you know pattern or decoration wise with the contrasting of the dark slip and the white clay just a few things would be we could or dip the slip in on and then finger wait through it lots of different patterns that way or we can use a coarse brush and do patterns that way um it's vast it's so much fun um but this pot we're just i'm just gonna dip it i feel like that there's so much interesting there's so much form going on here just dipping the slip works really well so or pouring it so i have to slip here [Music] get it down there we go [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Huntington Museum of Art

Views: 10,901

Rating: 4.8150287 out of 5

Keywords: art, ceramics, linda christianson, pottery, Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, museum, education, Chris Gustin, Bandana Pottery, Sanam Emami, handmade, kiln, wood fire, wheel thrown, clay

Id: BCJcmaLGUro

Length: 73min 59sec (4439 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020