Ceramics and Pottery – Coiling Technique

Posted by Alex T. on Jan 15, 2011 in Editor's Column | 4 comments

Yeah coiling technique – a technique used in hand building of clay ceramics. This technique is suitable to make customized objects like with unique shapes, figurines and even sculptures as compared to making cylindrical and roundish shape made using wheel throwing. YES ! – something I’m looking forward to – extend my skills in blending, and crafting figurines and stuff using ceramic clay.

Did you know? the one of the earliest form of jar, is made by clay using this technique in ancient Eqypt. See picture above (they are called canopic jars made to keep “organs” of the pharoah during mummification ewww…

Basically, you start with rolling / flattening the clay to form a base. This requires you to have 3 followings :-

• rolling pin
• a piece of nice cloth
• two wooden stick
• a piece of (remember to wedge) clay

Tips : when flattening start apply pressure on the center pushing upwards gently and re-center pushing backwards.  You should always place a two wooden stick as to help adjust your thickness of your base ( you don’t want to roll your clay way to flat down – then you will have no base to begin with ). Best to remove and reposition the clay base, as you further flatten it. This will avoid the clay from stick to the cloth. Once you finish your base, you might get a slight crack~ish texture appearing, to remove that, simply use a flat card (any plastic card will do) like and blend it like applying butter on a bread.

Then, you use the piece of clay base and cut out the shape you wanted to form the base. Roll pieces of clay (pinched from the balance clay you have) into coil and place them circular shape around the base. Keep making a few more coils on top of each other. Once you have around 2-3 coils, estimate a surface (facing outwards the clay, and start blending). You blend using your fingers pushing downwards to smoothen the surface.

As you spiral upwards, you can control your angle of craft you make by adjusting the coil positioning, position more towards the sideways goes sideways, position the coil towards inwards closes the gap even more after blending.

Me – coiling and blending my weird clay tree – hehe

Then, a thought came to me once, I observed all the creation made using ceramic clay. It’s different from other clay.

All ceramic clay have hole inside making them looked container like

When I asked my Sensei, why ceramic clay crafts have to have a somewhat hollow (some hole in the center e.g. pots, jars, jug, cup, piggy bank) approach to craft it, she answered – it is because the firing of ceramic clay for a full solid object (with no hole) takes longer hours and consume a lot more  resources in doing so. Besides, the whole point of making ceramics is to contain something  for storage (be in liquid or solid e.g. preserved food, coins) -thus, it’s called pottery ( duh…face palm..silly me – hey but, I did learned something today kay ).