Pottery is the ceramic ware made by potters. Major types of pottery include earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. The places where such wares are made are called potteries. Pottery is one of the oldest human technologies and art-forms, and remains a major industry today. Ceramic art covers the art of pottery, whether in items made for use or purely for decoration.

Background

Pottery is made by forming a clay body into objects of a required shape and heating them to high temperatures in a kiln to induce reactions that lead to permanent changes, including increasing their strength and hardening and setting their shape. There are wide regional variations in the properties of clays used by potters and this often helps to produce wares that are unique in character to a locality. It is common for clays and other minerals to be mixed to produce clay bodies suited to specific purposes.

Prior to some shaping processes, air trapped within the clay body needs to be removed. This is called de-airing and can be accomplished by a machine called a vacuum pug or manually by wedging. Wedging can also help to ensure an even moisture content throughout the body. Once a clay body has been de-aired or wedged, it is shaped by a variety of techniques. After shaping it is dried before firing. There are a number of stages in the drying process. Leather-hard refers to the stage when the clay object is approximately 75-85% dry. Clay bodies at this stage are very firm and only slightly pliable. Trimming and handle attachment often occurs at the leather-hard state. Clay bodies are said to be "bone-dry" when they reach a moisture content at or near 0%. Unfired objects are often termed greenware. Clay bodies at this stage are very fragile and hence can be easily broken.

Methods of shaping

The potter's most basic tools are the hand, but many additional tools have been developed over the long history of pottery manufacture, including the potter's wheel and turntable, shaping tools (paddles, anvils, ribs), rolling tools (roulettes, slab rollers, rolling pins), cutting/piercing tools (knives, fluting tools, wires) and finishing tools (burnishing stones, rasps, chamois).

Pottery can be shaped by a range of methods that include:

The potter's wheel. In the process that is called "throwing" (coming from the Old English word thrawan, which means to twist or turn ) , a ball of clay is placed in the center of a turntable, called the wheel-head, which the potter rotates with a stick, or with foot power (a kick wheel or treadle wheel) or with a variable speed electric motor. (Often, a disk of plastic, wood or plaster — called a bat — is first set on the wheel-head, and the ball of clay is thrown on the bat rather than the wheel-head so that the finished piece can be removed intact with its bat, without distortion.)