Pinch pots and glaze tests, ca.1973-76

All these pot fragments (along with sculpture of Fat Kate) were buried for 50 years beneath 2 feet of dirt between two dead cedars at my grandmother’s place. Talk about an unexpected archaeological find. Once a pot garden. Most of the pots were broken via time. It’s true, Thano Johnson said the bad pots tend to survive unscathed (teapot with my borate glaze was for our final. The lid had to fit, and it had to pour without dripping.) The ones with smoked black bottoms and blue and green streaks were raku pots, so the green glaze would’ve been metalic—copper-colored. It’s long since oxidized. I made many gourd pots for a raku class. Tiny pricked design pinch pot (one of three) was fired in our fireplace. Talk about oxidized low fire pots. They said it couldn’t be done. But I proved them wrong. You can indeed low fire a pot without a kiln. I was reinventing the archaeological wheel. One of the pots did not break, but the others did, as the walls were very thin. I did other tests with glazes, but glaze didn’t vitrify in a fireplace. Goblet was a high-fire test pot for cobalt and iron ash glazes (from our fireplace) I was working on. The pulled handles were a Thano trademark. He was a student of Soji Hamada, and had a Fullbright to study Korean peasant pottery.