Ancient Ruins

OMG she finally uploaded something new!

Anyway, yes, something new. Actually, something old; I built this in October of 2005, so there's nothing really new about it. This was a project where everyone in the class had to make 2 things in clay and then we chose 2 of somebody else's things from the class and used them to create a piece. My pieces that I chose were the basic tower shape (a really long rectangle with a hole down the middle), and a thrown sphere (which became the rubble after a minor accident).

My interpretation of this is this: A small party is exploring a part of the world their people has never been to before. They come across a behemoth tower surrounded by the ruins of walls and buildings put there by a mighty civilization they knew nothing about; indeed they didn't even know it had existed before then. A smooth, impossibly tall black tower spiraled to the heavens without any windows or holes to break it's sides though vines had begun to crawl up it's base. It was surrounded by a thick stone wall as tall as a man with only one arched gateway breaking it to allow access to the tower. On the plain below ruins of archways littered the ground, overgrown by bushes and trees.

A note on scale: To the hapless wanderer, this tower would stand probably 40 times their height; far higher than anyone of their time could ever cream of hoping to build. This lost civilization was advanced beyond their wildest dreams.

Anyways, back to reality. This was made of the standard class stoneware (no fancy recipe this time, sorry), "painted" with slips and underglazes and then coated for the most part in a clear glaze. Unfortunately the lower "plains" broke during firing and I'm missing a piece, but if ever there was a piece that's alright to be broken up, it's this one Final height is aprox. 16"

Edit: Uploaded a phenomenally better picture of this. Whoda thunk to use natural light? Not Jessie!