Ceramics Resource Guide

Presents information on a symposium of potters, scientists and art historians in Gubbio, Italy. Contribution of the firing program and the test rings withdrawn from the kiln at intervals during a lustre firing to the way nanocrystals develop high density in a glassy matrix; Required temperature for the firing of lustres; Discussion of the sensitivity of the lustre pigment.

There are few social phenomena in American history more striking than the growth of the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The United States was just beginning to awaken to the importance of these as a part of its economy, with ceramic arts being one of the most important. Perhaps, among the most significant of these arts is art pottery. It is a ware fashioned of clay, crafted for ornamental use only, and is covered in a variety of unique glazes. Ceramics exhibit the creator's own skill and individuality in shape and decoration.

The article discusses the search for perfect glaze on ceramic and pottery pieces. It notes the author's interest in deep crackle glazes and matte glazes, and his experiment with Currie's grid method to develop his glaze palette. The author also mentions the use of three base glazes, different oxides to create various colors, and less glassy white clay to achieve the perfect glaze fit for his pottery.

The article focuses on Roseville Pottery, an American art pottery established by George F. Young in Roseville, Ohio in 1892.

The article presents a historical background on the establishment of Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans, Louisiana, by H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, Tulane University's women's coordinate college. Topics include significance of Newcomb as one of American art potteries of the early 20th century, graduates employed and distinct objects produced during Newcomb's years in operation, and the works of several Newcomb artists, including Sadie Irvine, Harriet Joor, and Marie de Hoa LeBlanc.

The article narrates the experience of Sam Hall related to pottery. His pots have the capacity to jar familiar expectations of craft pottery and to exceed contemporary confluences between craft and fine art conceptualism. His practice may have been influenced and informed, in some ways, by St Ives Modernism, or the Leach pottery heritage, which has produced an enclave of excellent contemporary potters. It also notes that his pots have a common, yet sparse, language of solidity of form and repetition.

The article offers tips for a smooth and exacting surface decoration in a brown stoneware vase, including preparing stencils of pattern designs on tracing paper using pencil, drawing grid lines as a guide onto trimmed leather-hard pots, and transferring patterns onto the piece using a needle tool.

Type of Greek pottery that originated in Corinth c. 700 BC. The figures were painted in black pigment on the natural red clay ground. Finishing details were then incised into the black pigment, revealing the red ground.

Ceramics, including pottery, are one of the most ubiquitous artifact categories recovered from archaeological sites. Archaeologists use ceramics to answer questions about the dating of sites, changes in technology, economic organization, identity, status, ideology, and the movement and/or interaction of past societies. This chapter provides an overview of ceramic technology and the many uses of pottery for archaeological interpretation.

One of the purest of the clays, composed chiefly of the mineral kaolinite usually formed when granite is changed by hydrothermal metamorphism. Usage of the terms china clay and kaolin is not well defined; sometimes they are used synonymously for a group of similar clays, and sometimes kaolin refers to those obtained in the United States and china clay to those that are imported.

Common name for a number of fine-grained, earthy materials that become plastic when wet. Chemically, clays are hydrous aluminum silicates, ordinarily containing impurities, e.g., potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, or iron, in small amounts.

In ceramics, the process that ‘bakes’ the pottery clay hard, and fixes colours and glazes to pottery surfaces. The pottery is fired in a kiln, an ovenlike enclosure where the pieces undergo intense heating.

Mineral substance characterized by the property of absorbing basic colors and removing them from oils. It is composed mainly of alumina, silica, iron oxides, lime, magnesia, and water, in extremely variable proportions, and is generally classified as a sedimentary clay. In color it may be whitish, buff, brown, green, olive, or blue.

A glass-like film applied to pottery to make it watertight and give it a smooth finish. Glazes are usually made from sand and a fluxing agent which gives its name to the glaze.

The countries and regions that embraced early Islam were ideally located to absorb the cultural, commercial, and technical cross-currents of the early medieval world.

High-temperature furnace used for drying timber, roasting metal ores, or for making cement, bricks, and pottery. Ceramic kilns include early kilns, such as bonfire, sawdust, and wood-fired kilns, which have their roots in primitive cultures; and modern kilns, such as electric-, gas-, and oil-fired kilns, used in both the arts and industry.

Vessels made entirely or partly of clay, and fired to a strong, hard product; occasionally, the term refers to just the lower grades of such ware. Pottery may be glazed or unglazed. See Ceramics; Glazing.

In the broadest sense, is any ware made by hand and intended for utilitarian use. Stoneware and redware, certainly, fall within the category, as do certain types of yellowware, Rockingham, spongeware, spatterware, and sewer tile ware. Folk pottery is studied and evaluated for the aesthetics of both form and decoration or design.

Latest dating methods indicate that the art of making pottery came to the Southwest from Mexico about 500 b.c. Sherds, indestructible broken bits of the potter’s craft, litter the American West and lead the way to knowledge of the ancient cultures that fashioned them.

Type of Greek pottery that flourished from the late 6th to the late 4th century BC. Developed in Athens c. 530 BC, the red-figure pottery quickly overtook the older black-figure pottery as the preferred style of vase painting.

A durable household pottery, became part of life in the American colonies. Moving from place to place, living in harsh and often difficult physical conditions, the early settlers required pottery that was functional, durable, and easy to transport without breakage. Importation and domestic manufacture of stoneware, a hard bodied ceramic that had been produced in Europe from at least the sixteenth century, fulfilled their needs.

It usually falls into three main classes—porous-bodied pottery, stoneware, and porcelain.