Arts and Crafts VIII: The Dancing Lady

About three years ago, I was in the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. It is a wonderful little museum filled with unexpected treasures. I found this lovely lady. She is a piece of pre-Columbian Costa Rican pottery about which I know very little. I tried to find out more but didn’t get much of a response from the museum. So it goes.

 

Fast forward a couple of years. I’d been doing pottery a bit and kept coming back to her—I’d begun to call her the Dancing Lady. She’s clearly not a girl. This is a woman familiar with child bearing. She is not going to be left out of the dance. She will make her aging body follow the steps if it kills her. How could I not be entranced?

 

I decided to attempt to make a likeness. I was not going to say copy or reproduce since I didn’t have the skills. That didn’t say I couldn’t try.

 

I decided to throw two semi-closed bowls and then seal them together, adding on the face, legs, and arms afterwards. This is only not how the original artist did it since they did not have wheels nor did they use high fire glazes. But I’m still learning hand building.

 

But I had trouble with the proportions. I threw the two bowls but they were way too close together in size. I redid them into different pieces.

 

I had a similar problem with the next two—the top bowl much too large. I decided to make a single vase from it. The shape suggested the Venus of Willendorf so I incised the figure into the side of the vase and made the hair shape the throat of the vase. Then, I used some underglaze to highlight the figure and oxide to bring out the detail.

 

Behold Vasa de Willendorf.

 

 

 

My third attempt came closer. The head/body ratio is still not right but it’s closer. I used a burnt orange underglaze that looked more like the original. The top was a bit too tall but I wasn’t willing to cut it down.

 

 

But disaster! Severe crawling when the true-clear glaze was applied and fired. Instead of Dancing Lady, I got Leprosy Girl!

 

This was enormously discouraging. But, after a bit, I tried again.

 

This time I did a little better on the face. I decided to give her a smile—which gave her a sort of Pillsbury Dough Girl effect but I decided to go with it. One of the problems with Leprosy Girl was how the glaze made the face indistinct. I tried to fix that by using a little black underglaze on the mouth, nose, and eyes. Also, we used the same burnt orange underglaze with some resin treatment suggested by my instructor.

 

Better. I still think the proportions are wrong. The underglaze didn’t crawl but it still has the brushed look. In retrospect, I might have done better not to glaze the outside at all and only glazed the inside. Also, the black didn’t work as well as I would have hoped.

 

For the moment, I’m done with the attempt. But at least, she looks like she is having a good time.

 

Oh, yeah. Remember all that food that was intended to be shipped as aid overseas? Rather than distribute it, they let it expire and will burn it. See here.