The Folk Tradition in American Ceramics

This book will be a technical, how to publication that outlines the influence of Asian and American Folk traditions on American Ceramics. It will include techniques from individual artists including images of their work featured beside samples of their folk ceramic influences.

The introductory chapter will present ideas about utility and the importance of the handmade art object in our lives today, the expanding role of technology in our lives, the tangibility of functional ceramic versus the intangible experience of computer interactivity, mass production, issues surrounding authorship and identity and contemporary issues such as buying functional ceramics on E-Bay. I will also provide an outline of influential movements, times and types of ceramics with a historical overview of influential points of history in the folk tradition of ceramics.

I will speak about how specific functional potters have picked up on portions of their own historical cultural traditions and aspects of other cultural traditions that they have studied or researched, including the Leach/Hamada influence in the Mingei movement as originally outlined by Soetsu Yanagi and its relationship to the ideas developed by William Morris as well as the Minnesota Mingei movement beginning with Warren Mackenzie and his contribution expanding these ideas.

The use and collection of natural materials is also important as are the way in which the artists formulate and collect this material used in their work. This will be tied to their overall underlying philosophies about the work and the work's importance in the lives of the users. This book will feature several profiles of collectors of traditional or contemporary functional ceramics with folk influences.

The book will be organized as follows:

Equipment

· Traditional kilns (e.g., groundhogs, tunnel kilns and various types of traditional Japanese wood kilns such as noboragama and anagama)
· Examples include glaze grinding stones, clay mills, glass pounders, etc.
· Photographs or drawings of traditional style wheel from Japan, Korea, the Leach style Treadle and Southern Style Treadle.
· Ideas about building your own equipment such as home made pug mill as detailed in Harry Davis' The Potters Alternative, a homemade glass pounder, used for crushing bottle glass and a traditional stone glaze mill. Each item discussed would feature photographic examples.

Techniques/ Materials

· The ball opener
· Line blend glaze testing, making and mixing of traditional glazes
· Seeking out, harvesting, scrounging or searching the Internet for suitable raw materials
· Traditional glaze recipes, wood ash substitutes recipes, photographs of glaze tests
· A discussion on the traditional folk techniques in both eastern and western culture would cover Korean/Japanese techniques such as Yubigaki. Finger wipe decorations, hakeme: white slip that is applied with a stiff brush over dark clay, mishima: designs that are carved through white slip onto dark clay the making of traditional English slipware and perhaps the making of Korean onggi, kimche storage jars.

Artist Profiles

· Feature profiles of traditional folk, folk revivalist and contemporary ceramic artists in the United States and their technical information about their kilns, techniques, influences and glaze recipes.