Clay Work...

In our foundation art session this week we did clay work with the art technician which I found really useful. This is because I have not done much ceramic work in art other than back in secondary school when we made coil pots and painted them, but I really enjoyed this session as it felt like we were achieving something and actually had made an object that we could take away and keep.

I think that many schools shy away from using clay as it is messy and the teachers if they are non specialists may not have had much experience in working with the material themselves, but it is such a useful and hands on method of creating a thing that the children can take away and keep that we shouldn't deny children in primary schools of this experience.

In this session we covered three different techniques of creating pots which were creating:

Pinch Pots 

Which is where you start with a ball of clay and stick your thumb in the middle and pinch around the outside to create your pot so probably the simplest method of creating a pot. 

Coil Pots

Where you roll out a coil (like a long thing cylinder type thing) of clay and create a base (a flat piece of clay in whichever shape you would like your pot to be - generally these are circular) and gradually stacking these coils to build up the pot.

Slab Pots

This is where you roll out flat pieces of clay and cut them into the shape you want then score the edges and attach them to one another by applying a little bit of slip (which is pretty much watered down clay) 

Here are the notes I made on these techniques with mini diagrams...