At the beginning of January all of the first year education volunteers met in Kumasi for an In Service Training. We did a lot of stuff about grants and problems at site but the art group got to do practicals!
The first day we did screen printing.
The second day of practicals we went to a great village with a women’s group specializing in pottery.
The village makes a few different styles of pots. There are big round pots to hold water, round pots with holes on the sides for warming chickens in the coop (filled with embers for the chickens to huddle around) and the ubiquitous grinding bowl.
Every family has at least one!
The women can make a small grinding bowl in less than 5 minutes! On a usual day they meet from 4am til 8am and can make as many as 1,000 bowls.
First she scoops the center out of a cylinder of clay. The cylinder is rolled and is then added again to become the lip.
She smooths the walls and acts as a human throwing wheel, moving around the pot in a circle as she presses on the walls.
She uses some moist fabric to smooth the edges.
And just like that, it’s finished! Seriously, 5 minutes.
They’re fired in large kilns or wood fired in a pit.
After the pottery we went to a wood carving village. It was difficult but the men have almost no problem chopping the wood into these great sculptures! I chose to carve a Fante fertility doll because the people in the Central region are Fante. The shape of the head/hair is said to emmulate that of a Fante woman. Placed under a pillow it is said to aide in a woman’s fertility.
Those are beautiful bowls. Hand-built??? Wow. How do they get them so smooth, so round without a wheel?