Top Tips for Collecting Chinese Ceramics If you’re new to collecting Chinese ceramics, you may find yourself overwhelmed with just how much information is required in order to find pieces of value. You’ll need to know about palettes, glazes, reign marks, the different kiln sites, and you also need to handle as many pieces as …
Types of Pottery When we speak of clay are we talking about dirt? Dirt can cover different things. Dirt is divided into topsoil, clay, rock and inelastic earth. Topsoil is great for growing plants. Clay and inelastic earth have formed from decomposing rocks and their particle size is very small. Rocks can be divided into …
The World’s Oldest Known Ceramics – China’s First Pottery For the better part of the last two hundred years, historians believed that hunter-gatherer civilisations had a very basic tool-set that they made use of. These tools would often be made up of rudimentary knives, spears, and shivs, and would be used mostly for hunting, defence, …
Small ceramic disks have been found on Contact Period sites and Native American Woodland in every part of Pennsylvania. These objects were created by grinding smashed pieces of 17th Century Colonial or Native pottery into circular shapes. In certain cases, one or two holes got drilled through the centers of the disks, and it is possible that these disks were used by children as toys, and as game pieces by the adults of different groups of Natives and Colonists throughout the Northeast areas. (more…)
A faint mark exists on a shard of clay pottery that is, in fact, the oldest human fingerprint we’ve ever discovered. It was found at an archaeological site situated in Northern Kuwait, in Western Asia, and it is roughly 7 300 years old, which dates it back to the Stone Age. This same site has revealed a cemetery, a temple, a town, and more evidence of the community that once inhabited it so long ago, and proves that there is more to ceramics than just the utilitarian purposes we have assigned it over the years! It can inform us to our history, too, and reveal information about how we were working and living thousands of years ago. (more…)
From prehistoric to modern times, ceramists have been contributing to the world of art for centuries. As British ceramist Aaron Angell stated, “Ceramics is a medium that, with every passing decade, becomes easier for the untrained to manipulate—more rampant, versatile, and demystified, and perhaps more worthy of a clarified position within the wider history of sculpture”. Angell is by no means alone in this opinion – these contemporary artists are said to be redefining the landscape of ceramic art.