Making a Rope Impressed Bowl

Here's a short video on making the rope impressed serving bowl, inspired by the Jomon culture of ancient Japan. #ropeimpressed #Jomon #servingbowl #potterytechniques

A video posted by Cliff Glover (@cliffgloverpottery) on Aug 19, 2016 at 7:09am PDT

One of my favorite things to do is to impress clay with a short piece of rope. The technique is an old one — about 10,000 years – which the ancient Jomon culture of Japan used on their own pots. It seems like a natural enough thing to do, since "cords," which is a more accurate description,  were an everyday necessity  back then. These days we still use a lot of rope, especially in the fishing industry around were I live. I like to think that somehow I'm continuing this long tradition in my own work.