Raku pots, ca. 1973-76

 Most of these raku parts were based upon ancient Chinese bronze pots, so they stood on little legs and because they were raku pots they were also fragile. Most of the best ones broke early on and lost their metallic luster. What amazes me is that these pots survived being buried for decades in the garden, and some of them still retained their glaze luster. The ones that turned green, were once the color of a bright copper penny. Another thing that amazes me is the iron oxide made gray metallic streaks, and the blue and orange colors I can’t remember what I did glaze-wise, cobalt, and?, but they were all glaze experiments and I was pushing the art form as far as I could. I used rice hulls to smoke the pots and reduce the glaze. Sometimes I got lucky with those red streaks, kind of rare. The thin-walled puts did not survive the travesty of time, but the clunkers did. I was an in different wheel Potter, I was more adept at hand-building, probably because in high school we girls weren’t allowed to straddle a wheel as it was considered too suggestive for the boys. The little horned container may have been made by Bob Hamilton, but we were both making so many pots, sometimes we couldn’t tell whose was whose. But it shows the whimsey we were playing with.

This pot is unglazed, I burnished it with a smooth stone.