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Pottery is the ceramic ware made by potters. In everyday usage the term is taken to encompass a wide range of ceramics, including earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. The places where such wares are made are called potteries.
Pottery is made by forming a clay body into objects of a required shape and heating them to high temperatures in a kiln to induce reactions that lead to permanent changes, including increasing their strength and hardening and setting their shape. There are wide regional variations in the properties of clays used by potters and this often helps to produce wares that are unique in character to a locality. It is common for clays and other minerals to be mixed to produce clay bodies suited to specific purposes; for example, a clay body that remains slightly porous after firing is often used for making earthenware or terra cotta flower-pots.
Depending on shaping method there are a number of stages in the drying process of clay ware, indeed some processes do not require drying before firing. Leather-hard refers to the stage when the clay object is approximately 75-85% dry. Trimming and handle attachment occurs at the leather-hard state. A clay object is said to be "bone-dry" when it reaches a moisture content of near 0%. Unfired objects are often termed "greenware".
The above text is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article entitled "Pottery".
The term Glass art is a broad reference to the use of glass as an artistic medium. Specific approaches include stained glass, working glass in a torch flame (lampworking), glass beadmaking, glass casting, glass fusing, and, most notably, glass blowing. As a decorative and functional medium, glass was extensively developed in Egypt and Assyria, brought to the fore by the Romans (who developed glassblowing), and includes among its greatest triumphs European cathedral stained glass windows. Great ateliers like Tiffany, Lalique, Daum, Gallé, the Corning schools in upper New York state, and Steuben Glass Works took glass art to the highest levels. Glass from Murano (also known as Venetian glass) is the result of hundreds of years of refinement and invention. While there are now more hotshops and glass artists working in Seattle, Murano is still held as the real birthplace of modern glass art,
The glass objects created are not primarily utilitarian but are intended to make a sculptural or decorative statement. On the market, their prices may range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars (US). The best known contemporary glass artists include Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra, William Morris, Howard Ben Tre, Pino Signoretto, Bertil Vallien, Dante Marioni, Dan Dailey, Livio Seguso, Benjamin Moore, Stephen Rolfe Powell, Tom Patti, Klaus Moje, Toots Zynsky, Sonja Blomdahl and Marvin Lipofsky to name just a few.
Prior to the early 1960s, the term "glass art" referred to glass made for decorative use, usually by teams of factory workers, taking glass from furnaces with a thousand or more pounds of glass. This form of glass art, of which Tiffany and Steuben in the U.S.A., Gallé in France and Hoya Crystal in Japan and Kosta Boda in Sweden are perhaps the best known, grew out of the factory system in which all glass objects were hand or mold blown by teams of 4 or more men. In fact, the turn of the 19th Century was the height of the old art glass movement while the factory glass blowers were being replaced by mechanical bottle blowing and continuous window glass. In the factory, every member of the team does the same job repeatedly turning out dozens or hundreds of the same item each day.
The above text is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article entitled "Glass Art".
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