Art: Practically Perfect Pinch-Pots

In Year 2, we have been learning about sculptures and clay. To start off this topic, we studied the work of Barbara Hepworth who was a British artist and sculptor. We learned that she was part of something called the modernism movement, who wanted to experiment with new techniques and draw attention to the process that was involved with making art. She made sculptures from materials such as stone, wood and bronze. Barbara moved to St Ives in Cornwall and enjoyed working in the open air and her garden is still open to visit today. Barbara Hepworth has a sculpture on the side of a building near to school… does anybody know where/what it is?

We looked at a range of her work and discussed what we noticed about her sculptures.

After this, we focused on one sculpture in particular and used our sketching techniques that we learned when studying M.C. Escher to recreate the shapes that we saw. Shortly after this, we had a go at designing our own sculptures, using Barbara Hepworth’s work as our inspiration.

Over the past few weeks, we have designed our own pinch-pots with Miss Drury. We discussed some of our key vocabulary such as clay, ceramic and carve which means using a tool to cut away sections. We had a success criteria to consider when it came to designing our pots. We had to:

• Make a clay pot.
• Make a carving.
• Add lines and shapes to our clay work.
• Add texture by adding clay and with tools.

We looked at some images of different foods such as fruits and vegetables and thought about the different textures that they have. Whilst we were using Barbara Hepworth for inspiration, we wanted to link our designs to our geography topic of Food and Farming in the UK. After this, we then sketched our designs into our sketchbooks and thought about the different shapes, patterns and textures that we might be able to create.

We then went down to the Creativity Room to begin making our pots. We moulded our clay and were able to pinch it to successfully create a pot-shape. After this we used different tools to carve into our clay to create our designs by adding shapes and lines.

This week, we were able to paint our pots! We had to be able to mix a range of colours together to be able to make our desired shade. We were very pleased with how they turned out. We hope you like them!