Un-grubby

 

Three of my earlier pots made before I decided I liked grubby pots. Unfortunately, 'could do better, see me' - I lost the details of the two Bronze Age bowls from Catalonia in Spain. I didn't have any dimensions though, so mine are probably way too small anyway. The tall one is my first tall pot that didn't explode. It is a badly-shaped and way too tidy but size-precise (height, rim diameter, base diameter) copy of the Braunsbedra pot from Germany.

Whys and Wherefores

Over the last year or so I've been making copies, sometimes decent, other times not, of Neolithic and Bronze Age pots. As it says in the title, I'm not a potter, I don't have a wheel or an apron and I don't have a kiln or access to one and I don’t have any training but I do have a bunch of clay in a bag in the kitchen. I make my pots by hand - pinch pots, coil pots and so on – in said kitchen, to the joy of my wife I’m sure, and decorate them with bone and wood tools I make myself and as far as possible, I follow the designs on the original prehistoric pots. I fire them in an open fire up in the mountains where I have a little house.
As I'm never going to actually own a genuine prehistoric pot myself, I quite like the idea of having a bunch of copies sitting about
the house. The objective is quite simple, to make as near to exact copies of pots I like as possible with my limited skill and knowledge. In fact sometimes they are precise to the millimeter, other times, well not so precise. Sometimes I don’t even try. Sometimes after hours of decorating them, they explode or spall massively.  My focus though, is more on the designs than the pots so even if a pot is maybe too squat or too, tall or small, if the design is the same I’s a happy bunny.
The very few pots I’ve seen in museums have all had what I consider to be a terrible characteristic – they’ve all been cleaned, scrubbed down until they look like they might have been made yesterday. Such a pity, although, of course, I understand why they were cleaned. At the start I made a grotty little pot, boiled milk in it a dozen or so times on an open fire and then buried it for a month until it had been rained on and snowed on and tractors driven over it to my satisfaction. Then I dug it up and looked at it. It was black and dirt was caked into the design and it just looked grubby but very attractive I thought. So now I try to make all my pots look grubby and caked. Oh, and I like black pots too and even if the original pots are orange or beige, I make my ‘copies’ dark brown or black.  De gustibus.

So that’s it. If the pot has a name, it refers only to the name of the original pot that I was trying to replicate not to my pot of course. Never having seen any of these pots in reality I have no idea if my copies are accurate or not.