PLAYING A FORM

I took a few moments yesterday while in the midst of making terra cotta pieces for the holidays to continue to work out a design I have been playing around with for a short while. The form is roughly based on a Japanese small hand drum known as a kotsuzumi, these small hand held drums look a bit like an hourglass in shape and are used in Noh, Kabuki and Min'yo (Japanese folk music). So far, most of the pieces have been either covered jars or bottle forms so I decided to make a koro loosely based on a version of this form. The illustrated greenware koro was completed just an hour or so ago and is composed of several pieces put together, the base and slab bottom, the central portion and large wing were thrown as one piece and the lid and applied knob. I used a square motif to tie the pieces together first impressing groups of squares around the central portion and in the wing and lid, pierced squares as both decoration and to allow the incense aroma and smoke to escape the pot. I used the ration of 2:3 (6" and 9") for the width of the base to that of the wing as a jumping off point and obviously the proportions can be played with in future attempts, this being the first of the kotsuzumi-koro trials. I am likely to glaze this in Oribe and should it make it through the glaze firing, I will post up the finished results at some point in the future.

"Let cloud shapes swarm, Let chaos storm, I wait for form."  Robert Frost