The History Of Clay
When you put clay into a kiln, this hardens the substance, and is also known as firing. It can then be used to make bricks or tiles. 6000 BC was round about when people first began to fire clay, and the first evidence of the production of bricks was more than 5000 years ago, in the time of the Babylonians.
They were first used in their unbaked form, and just left to dry in the sun. They then proceeded to mix straw with the clay to help it stick together better, in order to build “mud-brick” houses.
It wasn’t until 2500 BC when people began to bake clay to be used as bricks. As stone wasn’t always available, and crafting proved difficult and time consuming, clay was the obvious option, as it was easy to mould, allowing the builder to create bricks of all different sizes. This led to different trends in architectural design in different periods in history and even separate trends in particular places.
Terracotta bricks (created with the natural material elements of clay, sand, water and then fire), were used by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and furthermore throughout history.
Terracotta bricks are also evident in the Po Valley in Italy dating back to the 2nd Century BC, as clay was more common than stone or marble in this area. It was used to imitate marble, by coating the clay with plaster and then decorated.
However, kilns set up around Piedmont in Italy, dated much earlier, show evidence of featuring slit like handles (“handle bricks”), which made bricks easier to carry.
The 12th Century saw the introduction of bricks from Italy to Germany, and this started the style of “brick gothic”, a reduced style of Gothic architecture which soon grew popular in Northern Europe and around the Baltic Sea, where there are no natural rock resources. The style of “brick gothic” consists of buildings built almost entirely of bricks, and examples can be found in Denmark, Germany, Poland and Russia.
Above: Brick Gothic Architecture
In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the brickwork on houses was often covered by plaster, as visible bricks had become unpopular.
The introduction of canals, railways, and roads meant that bricks could be transported much more easily over long distances, a great improvement on the previous method of horse and cart.
The demand for bricks grew during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and in the mid 18th century, visible brick walls again became more popular. Furthermore, there was a building boom in the mid 19th century in certain American cities such as Boston and New York, and locally made bricks were used instead of the usual brownstones of New Jersey and Connecticut.
Towards the beginning of the 19th Century, brick office buildings fell out of favour, as there was a trend for building offices upwards from materials such a cast and wrought iron, steel and concrete.
However, brick is still used to day for low to medium rise structures, or as a thin cladding over steel and concrete buildings, or for internal non- load bearing walls.
People have also used fired clay over time to create dishes, plates, cups and cookpots. They also fired their roof tiles, as these needed to be more waterproof than the walls. Below are some notes on the history of clay in pottery:
· First started making pottery about 6000BC, near the beginning of the Neolithic period.
· This was lightly fired in a fire of dry weeds.
· People made pottery as a way of showing their social identity and uniqueness.
· Many of the pottery designs were based on cloth, and this helps to define a certain group of people at a particular time in history.
· 3000 BC (beginning of the Bronze age)- people started to use slow potters wheel.
· They built the pot on platform of wood, so that you could sit down and turn it round easily.
· By 2000 BC, the slow wheel had been replaced by the fast wheel almost entirely in Europe and Asia, which span on an axle once you set it going. You could then start moulding the plot gradually out of the spinning lump of clay.
· Some Indo-Europeans introduced the fast wheel to Greece, Italy and China when they migrated there.
· Around the 5th to 6th Century BC, the Greeks were the best and most sophisticated around, plus their pottery has survived to this day better than any other pottery at that time. They introduced black figure and red figure patterns to their pottery.
· At the start of the Roman Empire, people began painting pottery red instead of black, and then began making pottery in moulds instead.
· After the Phoenician’s invention of glass blowing, lots of items such as cups and bowls, were made out of glass. This meant that glass was a serious contender with pottery, and was also very cheap.
· 100 AD- most of the best made and more attractive pottery supplied to the Roman Empire was made in North Africa, and shipped by boat all over the empire.
· North African pottery trade ceased in 700 AD after an Arab invasion.
· Round about this time in Sui Dynasty China, potters began to make porcelain cups and pitchers, which became popular in both China and West Asia.
· West Asian potters then invented lead glazes which gave ordinary pots a white, shiny appearance, and was a lot cheaper than porcelain pottery. It was created as an alternative to porcelain, as this was expensive to transport from China to West Asia, and took a long time using only camels and donkeys. The glazes also caught on after a while in China and Europe.
· 1200 AD- Yuan dynasty potters in China used different colour glazes to create designs on pottery. Once again, this was imitated by the West Asians using the same colour glazes, and that in turn was imitated by Europeans.
· In the 14th Century, Majolica the first tin glazed earthenware seen in Europe reached Italy, and by the 1500s, engravings from famous paintings were being copied onto dishes, which were reserved for decoration.
· In the 13th- 16th Century, Japanese pottery evolved to form it’s own styles to rival those of the Chinese, which began by the creation of 200 kilns in the district of Seto. Temmoku (stoneware cups and bowls with a iron-brown or black glaze), became increasingly popular in the samurai class of the tea ceremony, and was an imitation of the contemporary Chinese style.
· In 1588, Tanaka Chojiro, one of a family of Japanese potters, created pottery which had a dark tone, thick lead glaze and sometimes flashes of colour, plus were made entirely by hand. These were primitive and uneven, but perfect for the Tea Ceremony at that time, and christened raku by the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
· The Japanese Kakiemon style of the 17th century, featuring elegant and brightly coloured motifs become hugely influential in Europe, thanks to imports from Japan to Europe by the Dutch. This is possible due to the introduction of the Chinese system of overglaze painting in Japan.
· In the early 17th Century, the Dutch East India Company had begun to transport Chinese goods in large quantities, and the Ming dynasty were creating beautiful ceramics with blue decoration on a white background. Delft in Holland, was at that time a centre of developing ceramic industry, and their imitations of these Chinese styles receive great commercial success.
· In 1785, during the Industrial revolution, Stoke On Trent became known as The Potteries, and it’s two thousand pottery manufacturers employed 20,000 labourers.
· English pottery workers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, were led by Josiah Wedgwood, who was energetic, ambitious and enterprising in his work. This included jasperware (a durable unglazed porcelain), improved creamware, black basalt, and a series of fine figures created by famous modellers and artists working for him.
· 19th century potters began to create successful and beautiful wares decorated in pate-sur-pate (paste-on-paste- invented by Marc-Louis Solon, involving colours being laid on top of one another in reliefs of white or translucent tinted slip).
· Due to mass production, the development of new technology and machinery, the quality of pottery suffered in the early 20th century, with inartistic shapes, excessive design and tasteless colouring being seen as fashionable.
· Revived to it’s original form and decoration in the 1930s when ceramic artists experimented greatly with different techniques and materials.
· Largely influenced after World War 2 in both Europe and the United States by individual artists and artisans, who demonstrated striking originality, with tablewares and other commercial products reflecting their styles and patterns.
Above: Josiah Wedgwood
Statues have also been created out of clay, most particularly by the North Italian Etruscans from around 700 BC.
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