Member Event: Raku Firing - The Petrie Museum Festival of Pots

Member Events

Member Event: Raku Firing - The Petrie Museum Festival of Pots

Members get to dramatically glaze their ceramics by taking the red-hot glazed pots from the kiln, and burying them in sawdust. The resulting pots and cracks in the glaze are beautifully smoked and blackened where they have soaked up the carbon from the burnt wood.

This event coincides with the Petrie Museum Festival of Pots, which celebrates and explores their often overlooked collection of ancient Egyptian clay vessels.

The Petrie Museum holds over 80,000 objects of which almost 12,000 are made of  clay: from baby bottles to gaming tokens, from dolls to ancient  souvenirs. This includes of course the remarkable collection of ancient  pots that gave the pioneering archaeologist Flinders Petrie the key  to understanding different time periods of ancient Egypt by painstakingly noting the smallest of details.

His records of pottery styles led to a new method of establishing chronological periods, known as seriation in Egyptology.

More info on Petrie Events

Related events:

Studio Manifold residency exhibition
Artwork shown throughout the Petrie Museum, and in Beadle’s Box (South Cloisters, opposite Jeremy Bentham), UCL.
6 June – 5 July

Materials focused art and design collective Studio Manifold have made new work in response to the Petrie Pots, and the methods used by Flinders Petrie. Individual works include video installation, a reconstruction Petrie’s “drawing machine”, Egyptian bread moulds, and a childrens book.

The Festival of Pots
Saturday 7 June 12-4pm

Roll up for a fun afternoon of activities and spectaculars, including the Pot Orchestra, Egyptian sourdough bread-making (with real Egyptian bacteria!), smoke fired ceramics, pop-up Egyptian street food and drink, and a ceremonial pot-smashing!

An exhibition of work by community groups in Camden working with Studio Manifold
20 May -14 June 2014
North Lodge, UCL

This exhibition is a response to the idea of defining time periods by stylistic features. Each of the pots produced by the different workshops reflect the idea of Petrie’s seriation and are grouped together.

The work has been made by community groups based in Camden working alongside Manifold, to discover the power of the humble pot. Groups include:

1A Arts (part of Holborn Community Association), which includes Holborn Asian Women’s Association, Millman’s Older People Group, different local youth groups, and school groups years 5 and 6 from Chris Hatton Primary School, Camden, and The Third Age Project - part of Euston Timebank which includes both families and older people living in and around the Regent’s Park Estate.

From Broken shed to pot - the magic of Petrie's drawing machine

17 May, 5-8pm , Petrie Museum Free - drop in!

As part of Museums at Night and led by Studio Manifold join us for an evening of drawing and sketching using a replica of Petrie’s drawing machine. His homemade contraption was used to identify from broken pot fragments just what the original pot would have looked like.