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Published: July 24th 2011
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Cart in Jingdezhen.
I watch these carts go by everyday with different items. Let me start off by giving a big thanks to everyone that has been following my blog and for all the comments. I am so happy to share this experience with all of you and I wish I could blog more! My internet connection is kind of slow, I am trying to do and see a lot of things everyday and this past week I got sick. (More about this in a later blog post...it involves a trip to the hospital and it was interesting!) I am about a week behind in the events I want to share so stay tuned for more.
Also, this trip would not be financially possible without the generous grant I was awarded through the Artist Foundation of San Antonio and a travel grant through Artpace. (Check out Artpace's blog, you will find my travels posted there as well!) While things are ending up to be more expensive then I initially budgeted ( I will be lucky to have a dollar to my name when I get back!), my experiences here are priceless and I know it will change me and my work forever. Thank you San Antonio for all your support can't wait to
see you all when I get back.
What is great about the Pottery Workshop is that their staff organizes little trips for us to the surrounding ceramic factories to see how items are being made. So when you think of factories you think of lots of mechanical machines moving and cranking out things, right? Well it's kind of like that here but more people less machine. A lot of the ceramic items we surround ourselves surprising are still made by people and with their hands. The people here are the factory.
One stop we made was to an abandoned plate factory. This factory solely made slip cast porcelain plates and when the economy hit China hard a few years ago it was forced to shut down. The government took over the building and threw all the plates out. So next to the factory, hundreds and thousands of plates were dumped outside in large stacked piles for the length of a city block. It was amazing to see that many plates and I could only imagine that it was someones job to stack them. A fellow resident here with me said she visited this broke plate factory three years
ago and the piles were even taller. I was really tempted to take one and I'm thinking I might go back and do so. The whole scene felt like an installation to me and in Jingdezhen no one seems to care or even notice the huge piles of plates sitting outside.
After the Broken Plate factory we headed over to the Big Pot Factory. This factory is where they make over 5 feet tall blue and white painted vases and large over 3 feet wide planter bowls. I remember visiting this factory when I was here in 2006 and it was in a large dilapidated building in a country part of Jingdezhen. They have since upgraded to a nice and newer building and things are still made the same way. These large vases are thrown in rings and segments and later stacked to form large vases. They require a lot of clay to do so and it takes two men throwing and sitting across from one another to center and move that much clay. One man is the master throwing and has been throwing for 20 years and his partner is his apprentice and must be one for a
full year before he can become a master thrower. Before they even become a thrower they must wedge clay for one full year.
The apprentice puts his hands over the masters to give him more strength when he throws. They throw large rings that become segments, two men are the lifters to remove it from the wheel, take the ring outside to dry in the sun and once dry they are stacked. Some vases are stacked as high as nine large segments! Over 10 feet tall! The segments are not specially joined during the leather hard stage but they are glazed together in the kiln and are almost totally seamless.
The kilns are huge but because of the size of these massive vases only 7 to 8 can fit into a kiln. After the glaze firing they are ready for blue and white decoration. Underneath the bottom of every pot is 2 long strips of fabric laid in a cross pattern. This is there so two men, standing on either side can bend down and grad the fabric and carry the pots from the kiln to the decorating area. Mostly woman have the decoration jobs but master painters
Me and broken plates.
They were as tall as me. seem to almost always be men. They can spend up to one week decorating one large vase.
The big question about these large blue and white vessels is where do they go? Who buys them? No local people own them and a majority of these large pieces gets bought by large hotels and restaurants allover Asia. When I get back to Shanghai it is my mission to find some of these because the hotel I stayed at didn't have one.
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Letty
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wow
Hi, I finally got a chance to read your blog and see your pics...and its 3am here. Great pics and what a great experience for you!