Throughout prehistory the Circumpolar World was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Pottery-making would have been extremely difficult in these cold, northern environments, and the craft should never have been able to disperse into this region. However, archaeologists are now aware that pottery traditions were adopted widely across the Northern World and went on to play a key role in subsistence and social life. This book sheds light on the human motivations that lay behind the adoption of pottery, the challenges that had to be overcome in order to produce it, and the solutions that emerged. Including essays by an international team of scholars, the volume offers a compelling portrait of the role that pottery cooking technologies played in northern lifeways, both in the prehistoric past and in more recent ethnographic times.

"Raised in Clay" is a remarkable portrait of pottery making in the South, one of the oldest and richest craft traditions in America. Focusing on more than thirty potters in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Kentucky, Nancy Sweezy tells how families preserve and practice the traditional art of pottery making today.
First published in 1984, Sweezy's book documents the last generation of potters to have direct contact with preindustrial pottery traditions. It portrays the personalities of the potters, treating this aspect as carefully as the traditions themselves, and discusses various types of wheels, glazes, and kilns and each potter's specialty pieces. Photographs and line drawings showing potters, their potteries and equipment, examples of finished work, and step-by-step works in progress enhance the text. Sweezy's introductory chapter provides a superb history of southern pottery making. For this edition, she has added a new afterword on recent changes in the potting scene.

This richly illustrated portrait of North Carolina's pottery traditions tells the story of the generations of "turners and burners" whose creations are much admired for their strength and beauty. Perhaps no other state possesses such an active and extensive ceramic heritage, and one that is entirely continuous. This book is an attempt to understand both the past and the present, the now largely vanished world of the folk potter and the continuing achievements of his descendants. It is a tribute that is long overdue.
From the middle of the eighteenth century through the second quarter of the twentieth century, folk potters in North Carolina produced thousands of pieces of earthenware and stoneware -- sturdy, simple, indispensable forms like jars and jugs, milk crocks and butter churns, pitchers and dishes, ring jugs and flowerpots. Their wares were familiar and everyday, not innovative or unusual, because they were shaped through generations of use for specific functions. The utilitarian forms were so commonplace and embedded in daily life that few individuals documented the craft. "Turners and Burners" is the first book to chronicle these pottery traditions, with close attention to distinct regional and temporal patterns and the major families involved. It explores in detail the traditional technologies used, from the foot-powered treadle wheel to the wood-fired groundhog kiln.
Terry Zug became interested in North Carolina pottery in 1969 shortly after moving to Chapel Hill. In 1974 he began documenting the craft and traveled throughout the state recording the reminiscences of potters, former potters, and members of potters' families who recalled the old craft in remarkable detail. He systematically photographed and cataloged old pots, located early shop sites, and carefully recorded the remaining waster dumps of broken shards and decaying equipment. His primary source, however, was the potters themselves. Their tape-recorded interviews provide an insider's view of their world and reveal the powerful underlying logic and autonomy of their craft.

This broad approach to slab work shows a wide variety of building methods and highlights the work of high-profile ceramic artists. Slabs can be used to make a variety of forms ranging from the most basic to the more complex. The book covers many building methods using a varied range of pots and sculptures, demonstrated through step-by-step images. With fantastic images of finished work from high-profile ceramic artists for inspiration, you are also encouraged to experiment and find the methods that are most suited to you. Slab Techniques covers all the basics, such as making your slabs and joining well, simple building methods, use of supports, creating textures, decorating with slips and ways to avoid problems during the firing stage. The handbook also looks at innovative and original approaches, as well as building large-scale pieces and the potential issues associated with them. This book is an essential addition to the bookshelves of students and professional ceramicists.

The C4th Roman Rotunda church in Thessaloniki is the most important monument of the early Christian era. In this comprehensive monograph, Hjalmar Torp presents the findings of his life-long archaeological and iconographic research on the Rotunda. He explores the archaeological data, the various phases of the architecture, and the chronological issues of the monument. The nuanced descriptions of the mosaics, their colours and their techniques are based on a detailed scaffold review and survey. The iconography of the mosaics is then analyzed and interpreted in conjunction with historical and theological sources; the building of the palatine church and its sumptuous decoration is attributed to an initiative by Theodosius the Great. This slip-cased set of two books, abundantly documented and richly illustrated, is a unique testimony on the Rotunda. Volume One: text. Volume Two: Illustrations. 500 illustrations, many in colour. This book is only available in French.

A study of the styles of decoration found on the early southwestern pottery known as White Mountain Redware. The White Mountain Redware tradition, an arbitrary division of the Cibola painted pottery tradition, is composed of those vessels which have a red slip and painted decoration in either black or black and white, which when grouped into pottery types have a geographic locus within or immediately adjacent to the Cibola area, and which share a number of other attributes indicative of close historical relationships.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler describes the architecture and town planning, the sculpture and painting, the silverware, glass, pottery and the other rich artistic achievements of the era.

Francis H Harlow (1928-present) is a world class physicist, an expert on Pueblo Indian pottery and Southwest sea fossils, an accomplished painter and cellist. In this memoir, the retired Los Alamos scientist and scholar looks back on his life and career, including his fifty years as a theoretical physicist at one of the U.S.'s top research facilities. He considers his study of Pueblo pottery a "hobby", though it draws on archaeology, history and ethnography, as well as interactions and interviews with living and deceased potters (including Maria Martinez). This book highlights the Museum of Indian Art (Santa Fe) Harlow Pottery Collection.

With contributions from outstanding specialists in glass art and East Asian art history, this edited volume opens a cross-cultural dialogue on the hitherto little-studied medium of Chinese reverse glass painting. The first major survey of this form of East Asian art, the volume traces its long history, its local and global diffusion, and its artistic and technical characteristics. Manufactured for export to Europe and for local consumption within China, the fragile artworks studied in this volume constitute a paramount part of Chinese visual culture and attest to the intensive cultural and artistic exchange between China and the West. With contributions by Thierry Audric, Kee Il Choi Jr., Patrick Conner, Karina H. Corrigan, Elisabeth Eibner, Patricia F. Ferguson, Lihong Liu, William H. Ma, Alina Martimyanova, Christopher L. Maxwell, Rupprecht Mayer, Jessica Lee Patterson, Michaela Pejcochova, Jerome Samuel, Hans Bjarne Thomsen, Jan van Campen, Rosalien van der Poel

After Glow documents the New Nordic Porcelain Forum, a project which focuses on the Nordic tradition of porcelain production. The focal point is the collaborative work of 13 ceramic artists from the Scandinavian regions, who gathered for a residency in Denmark in 2019 and in 2021 for a two-week stay in various workshops associated with porcelain production in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. This publication not only serves as an exhibition catalogue, it offers insights into the important industrial and design histories of northern Europe, as well as into today's use of porcelain as an artistic medium. In doing so, it is hoped that the production of Nordic contemporary ceramics will advance to a new collaborative practice in order to transform and therefore preserve this important cultural heritage.

Beautifully illustrated with richly detailed photographs, this volume traces the living heritage of locally made pottery in the English-speaking Caribbean. Patricia Fay combines her own expertise in making ceramics with two decades of interviews, visits, and participant-observation in the region, providing a perspective that is technically informed and anthropologically rigorous. Through the analysis of ceramic methods, Fay reveals that the traditional skills of local potters in the Caribbean are inherited from diverse points of origin in Africa, Europe, India, and the Americas.At the heart of the book is an in-depth discussion of the women potters of Choiseul, Saint Lucia, whose self-sufficient Creole lifestyle emerged in the nineteenth century following the emancipation of plantation slaves. Using methods inherited from Africa, today's potters adapt heritage practice for new contexts. In Nevis, Antigua, and Jamaica, related pottery traditions reveal skill sets derived from multiple West and Central African influences, and in the case of Jamaica, launched ceramics as a contemporary art form. In Barbados, colonial wheel and kiln technologies imported from England are evident in the many productive clay studios on the island. In Trinidad, Hindu ritual vessels are a key feature of a ceramic tradition that arrived with indentured labor from India, and in Guyana potters in both village and urban settings preserve indigenous Amerindian culture. Fay emphasizes the integral role relationships between mothers and daughters play in the transmission of skills from generation to generation. Since most pottery produced is intended for domestic use as cooking pots, serving vessels, and for water storage, women have been key to sustaining these traditions. But Fay's work also shows that these pots have value beyond their everyday usefulness. In the process of forming and firing, the diverse cultural heritage of the Caribbean becomes manifest, exemplifying the continuing encounter between old and new, local and global, and traditional and contemporary.

The work of Pia Burrick isn't coquettish, but genuine.Her stories and images touch, move and sometimes cause uneasiness. Burric's artistic oeuvre can be divided into applied and free work. Her functional applied glass creations are made to measure for specific interiors and complement existing elements. These creations, mostly stained-glass windows, are made using traditional techniques but are nonetheless contemporary in style and most of all in perfect harmony with the space. Her private work is more open, more sober and more powerful.The designs in which she toys with the boundary between figuration and abstraction are most imaginative and convincing. Glass allows working on both sides, opaque or transparent, projecting or reflecting, with or without colour. Burrick experiments with combinations of pure glass, enamel, lead or lead sheets The themes and subjects determine the techniques. Images from around the home, newspaper photos or television stills are often at the base of her objects. Any image that is powerful and sticks in the mind is hung up in the studio, where it waits until it is transformed and takes on its definitive form. Pia Burrick is a remarkable artistic personality who made glass art her favourite form of expression. Text in English and Dutch.

The leaded and cemented stained glass of the workshop of Heinrich Staubli (1926-2016), St. Gallen, which is integrated into churches, restaurants, and schools, continues to shape the built environment of Eastern Switzerland today. The output of the workshop is characterized by relations among stained glass, murals, and graphic, textile, and funerary arts. This is the first analysis of the artworks and the estate from the perspective of intermediality and within the framework of modern art history. The study offers a systematic contextualization of Staubli's work within the history of stained-glass art in German-speaking countries, elucidating not only the operations of the artistic workshop but, more broadly, the artistic-social relevance of stained glass far beyond Switzerland in the 20th century.

Stained glass has been one of the chief glories of Britain's churches since Norman times. Stained glass windows developed through the middle ages, as new techniques were introduced, and the art of storytelling in glass reached ever greater heights. Surviving windows from this period make up the greatest collection of pre-Tudor art to have survived the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries techniques changed, with the emphasis moving from stained to painted glass, and a new interest in non-religious subjects, but in the nineteenth century medieval techniques and subjects were revived. These windows from the gothic revival period constitute the great majority of our national collection of glass. The twentieth century saw a new flowering of stained glass, and at both old churches and new, modern glass is a striking and highly effective feature. This book examines not only the history of this wonderful art form but the techniques used to make it, from the first sketches all the way to installation. This book is part of the Britain's Heritage series, which provides definitive introductions to the riches of Britain's past, and is the perfect way to get acquainted with stained glass in all its variety.

This book was published as part of the Glass in MAS project, a multidisciplinary research project on the glass collection of the MAS collection Vleeshuis (Antwerp, Belgium). Never before has the collection of archaeological glass of the MAS Vleeshuis Collection in Antwerp been described and disclosed in its entirety. This hidden treasure is part of a valuable study collection on 20 centuries of glass production, a wealth of information that has remained underexposed. The archaeological part is presented for the first time in this extensive catalogue.

A pioneer in the international studio glass movement, Erwin Eisch helped establish the medium in Europe with his distinctively distorted glass vessels and imaginative sculptures of mold-blown glass. His works--which also include paintings, drawings, and vitreographic prints--are important as well for the challenge they pose to the distinctions among the art forms, as well as between concreteness and abstraction. With contributions by scholars well-versed in Eisch's body of work, this book provides an introduction to the artist and an in-depth look at his development, from his start within the glassmaker tradition of the Bavarian Forest to the present. Eisch began with functional vessels, including bottles, vases, and steins, often distorting the hot glass to create interesting, imperfect shapes. Incorporating ceramic molds, he also produced painted glass sculptures, including a series of busts that depict Picasso, Buddha, and friend and fellow glass artist Harvey Littleton. Later, Eisch's creative output expanded to include drawings, paintings, and prints. Eisch's works are inspired by reality, but move well beyond it to incorporate vivid elements of imagination and fantasy. In addition to the essays and more than one hundred illustrations of Eisch's work, the book contains selected writings by the artist himself.

This unique reference book compares the glass art of Samuel and Gottlob Mohn with the works of Anton Kothgasser. They explain the differences and similarities of decoration and painting using pieces from major museums and inaccessible private collections, and employing never-before published texts, images, and detail shots. Using the description of the glass as a starting point, the author recreates the time and lifestyle of its creation. Using his spectacular shots he points out what is important in the collection and describes vividly the important role played by the spirit of the piece when it comes to distinguishing an original from good copy. This bilingual book for the first time compares these cooperating but also competing artists and presents their individual characteristics. German and English text.

It begins with the history of the site, recounting how, as J. Paul Getty's art collection grew, he chose to house it in a replica of the ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum now known as the Villa dei Papiri. The second chapter chronicles the destruction of Herculaneum in 79 CE during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Villa dei Papiri's rediscovery in the eighteenth century, and more recent archaeological discoveries at the site. The third chapter leads readers on a tour of the Getty Villa, from the cobblestone "Roman road" through the outdoor theater, atrium, peristyles, and gardens; it includes detailed descriptions of special rooms such as the Basilica, the Room of Colored Marbles, the Temple of Herakles, and the Tablinum. The final chapter recounts how Getty began collecting art in the late 1930s, how the collection grew in the decades before and after his death in 1974, and how the displays at the Villa have evolved along with the collection. This edition includes a new director's foreword, as well as revised and refreshed main text, new photography and also includes updated floor plans of the newly reinstalled Villa.

Lively, informative and full of original tips and techniques Simon's YouTube videos have lit the ceramics world on fire, becoming a must-see supplement to most potters' educations. But therein lies the hitch; most potters don't want to take a laptop into a ceramics studio. This is where Simon Leach's Pottery Handbook comes in, encapsulating all of Simon's basic techniques in one easy to carry book, from studio design and set up, to basic throwing techniques, adding appendages, trimming, glazing and firing. Simon Leach's Pottery Handbook is perfectly suited for the studio, as it is portable and the concealed wire-o binding will help the book lay flat and stand up. For each technique, detailed step by step photography captures the subtle, intricate movements that typically fly by too fast to be noticed in a video. Plus the book includes a DVD with many of Simon's YouTube videos; callouts throughout the book tell readers which video goes with each section. Gorgeous photos throughout the book show pots in various stages of production and finished results; something that is currently missing from the YouTube videos, so that an aspiring potter can see how the work will look once it has been fired.

This catalogue describes what is probably the most encyclopaedic collection of early coloured Worcester porcelain in existence. Henry Marshall assembled the collection between the two World Wars. In the years that followed, he sought to represent as comprehensive a range of patterns as possible, with minimal duplication, so that his collection would become a true reference work in itself. Every piece was acquired for specific purpose, many of them either to further his knowledge or because they were so rare. He was one of a small group of ceramic collectors who sought to document sources and influences, creating comprehensive hypotheses for the objects' histories. In this case specifically, Marshall's records reveal the Far Eastern influence on Worcester porcelain, alongside the many other prototypes used by decorators of these fine ceramics. This catalogue, like the collection itself, seeks to present early Worcester porcelain to collectors and a wider public in a systematic way. It describes, classifies, and reproduces every item in the Marshall Collection. It does not seek to present detailed new research, but to record the state of knowledge about the subject at the time of writing.

What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peoples engaged with Greek beliefs. Monumental funerary vases that accompanied the deceased were decorated with consolatory scenes from myth, and around forty preserve elaborate depictions of Hades's domain. For the first time in over four decades, these compelling vase paintings are brought together in one volume, with detailed commentaries and ample illustrations. The catalogue is accompanied by a series of essays by leading experts in the field, which provides a framework for understanding these intriguing scenes and their contexts. Topics include attitudes toward the afterlife in Greek ritual and myth, inscriptions on leaves of gold that provided guidance for the deceased; funerary practices and religious beliefs in Apulia, and the importance accorded to Orpheus and Dionysos. Drawing from a variety of textual and archaeological sources, this volume is an essential source for anyone interested in religion and belief in the ancient Mediterranean.