Ceramic Alphabet

Learning about ceramic has been a challenging experience, and not just because learning the technique is difficult and a lot of practice is needed.  As a teacher, retrospectively, I compare my learning experience in ceramics to learning the alphabet in an haphazard way.  Normally, you memorize the alphabet first, to get the big picture, and then you learn to write each letter and recognize them, then you manipulate each letter with the others until you can combine them and recognize them and learn to read. Soon you can create stories that have never been told before and that everyone can access from the combination of 26 letters and a few symbols.

Learning ceramics at first is like being assigned to a random letter without a clue that the alphabet even exists, and then you’re going to spend 6 weeks learning about this specific letter and some aspects of it but never in the context of the entire alphabet.  You will only get glimpses of the other letters without being told what they do or how they are pronounced.   If you start with wheelthrowing, you will not learn about handbuilding, or firing your pieces, or how clay is made, or what chemistry has to do with the entire process, or what is a glaze and how it works or even what ceramics actually means. 

[I learned only recently that ceramics includes glass, and that ceramics is defined more by what is is NOT than by what it is. “hard, durable, heat-resistant materials made by shaping and baking inorganic, non-metallic substances (like clay) at high temperatures”.]

There are so many information that I am still learning randomly every day about a subject I have been studying for more than 20 years now.  I hope that if you study ceramics at university, they actually give you the big picture, but for people like me, who did not get formal schooling on the subject and just picked it up over the years, one random workshop after another, it is extremely frustrating because there is so much to learn and there should just be a better system to learn about it.

From these thoughts came the fun idea of imagining the pages of an alphabet book about ceramics with some of the weird vocabulary I learned over the years. I imagine newbies to ceramics getting it as as a gift, and maybe there would be a little dictionary as the end if you want the definitions. Here’s a glossary by Ceramic Materials Workshop you could refer to as well. They don’t have anything for X and Y either!  

Should I ask AI to create my ceramic alphabet book just to see how confused it gets and what illustrations it picks for zirconium or bisque? Of course, a real artist would be my first choice! 

Here’s my Official Proposal for a ceramic alphabet book, one letter at a time. I put alternative words in parenthesis, let me know what I forgot! If you have better words for X and Y, I am all ears!  Some are objects, some techniques, some are places related to ceramics, some are chemical elements used in ceramics, some are flaws, it’s all a big mess like learning ceramics, a total alphabet soup!

Anagama (atmospheric firing, ash glazes)

Bisque (boron)

Clay (coils/ chemistry/ceramics/centering/cobalt/celadon/copper/carbonate/cones/ crystalline/ crawling/crazing)

Deflocculant (Delft (in the Netherlands), dunting)

Extruder (earthenware)

Flux (feldspar, frit, firing, flocculant, Faenze (in Italy), faience, flameware)

Grolleg (greenware, glaze, glass former)

Handbuilding (Hanjiki,  high fire)

Iron (inlay)

Jingdezhen(in China)

Kaolin (Kintsugi, kiln)

Limoges (in France)

Mishima(Majolica, Moka diffusion, melting)

Nerikomi

Oxide (Obvara, oxidation firing)

Porcelain (pottery, pit firing, plaster, pinholing, pugmill, pinch pot)

Quartz inversion

Raku (reduction firing, respirator, refractory, ribs)

Slipcasting (stoneware, slip, slab, silica, sgraffito, saggar, sodafired, saltfired, shino, shivering, specific gravity, stain)

Terra cotta (terra sigilata, trimming, thowing, temoku, talc, tools (wire, loop, needle…))

Underfired

Vanadium (viscosity)

Woodfired (wheelthrowing, Wedgwood, whiting, wadding)

Xiem (ceramic tool brand/ I have nothing for X)

Yellow Winokur (OK, it’s more of a W, but I have nothing for Y)

Zirconium (zinc)