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Biot Jars France


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I've seen some old posts about this topic.

I visited the Biot Ceramics museum yesterday.

They have a brilliant video showing the making technique - proformas, coils of rope and slapping on of clay, then smoothing outside.

However, they don't show removing of rope from inside of pot. Do they remove it or does it burn away in firing - if so isn't this extravagant?

The pottery, by the way, closed 3 years ago and only decorative ceramics are now made in Biot, apparently.

Love to hear any responses.

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I wish I could have seen the video because they look like coil built clay pots ... which means building a pot with long coils of clay.

This is a very ancient technique, so cannot understand why they would have used real rope first. Are you sure they were using rope and not just long rolls of clay that resembled ropes? Interesting technique if it was real ropes.

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Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response.

 

I must say it seemed a very convoluted way of making a jar - wooden forms (4 I think) attached to a wooden base and then rope coiled round and round the forma, after which clay is slapped on to the coiled rope. Clay is smoothed, presumably inside too to cover rope. They may then leave to become leather hard and remove the rope but I can't imagine how without destroying the pot. That's why I wondered if they glaze inside and rim and fire with rope intact. I guess they'd be low fired earthenware type ware.

 

They certainly weren't coiled. If I made a pot this big I'd throw the base up to a reasonable height and add coils.

 

Maybe an interesting class project?

 

Anne

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You might have already seen my old post about this so apologies if you have and this is redundant. In the link below the author says the rope burns out but if you look at the pictures of the pots pre-firing there is no rope, plus the rope they use already looks used in the pictures.

 

http://deborahsilver.com/blog/tag/handmade-garden-pots/

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