Ceramic Slab Building Techniques

Beth peterson is a potter artist and writer with more than 30 years of experience crafting clay and ceramics.

Ceramic slab building techniques. Birdie boone works with super thin slabs to make. Modern potters and ceramic sculptors have embraced the slab creating works using both soft slabs and stiff leather hard slabs. The aim is to explore and explain most of these methods through step by step images and text using a varied range of both pots and sculpture. Pinchpot coiling and slab techniques.

The machine then has a piece of cloth connected to it which you lay on top of the clay. The figure s elaborate garb jewelry and headdress represent the. Slabbing clay is a technique the includes. Below are the three most common forms of creating hand built pots.

It flattens out the clay and makes it ready to use. Most do not realize the infinite world of hand building and the artistic possibilities it opens. Most ancient cultures gravitated to the pottery wheel for the creation of vessels. More on soft slab pottery.

Slabbing clay is a handbuilding pottery technique that has been around for centuries. This broad approach to slab work shows a wide variety of building methods and shows the work of many high profile makers in this area. The most common handbuilding techniques are pinch pottery coil building and slab building. Today slab pots and slab building techniques are experiencing a renewed popularity.

Before potters had the wheel they were creating beautiful pots and clay forms using clay their hands and fingers and basic hand tools. Which is formed by joining flat slabs of clay together. Liz zlot summerfield is also an excellent resource for slab building techniques. In order to work a slab roller you lay your clay on a long strip of cloth.

Next you turn a giant wheel and the slab roller rolls over the clay like a steam roller. Slab pots tend to be a bit tougher to produce technically speaking than those created using other. Effigy urn in the form of the sun god from 12th 14th century mesoamerica is formed from a slab of unglazed clay also called earthenware. To make a pinch pot one inserts a thumb into a ball of clay and continually pinches the the clay between the thumb and fingers while rotating to thin.

To get you started check out this article by daryl baird on using slump molds with soft slabs. How to slab clay. Handbuilding is an ancient pottery making technique that involves creating forms without a pottery wheel using the hands fingers and simple tools. Before potters began using pottery wheels simple tools were used to create clay pottery.