How Mata Ortiz Pottery Is Made

Today I have come to the

pottery

town of Ma Ortiz in northern Mexico and I am going to show you how they make their

pottery

here, but I am not going to approach it as a tourist or as a ceramic collector, but rather I am going to do something that I have not seen before. I'm going to approach Mo Ortiz's ceramics from the perspective of a potter, so let's delve into the methods and techniques they use. here to make her beautiful pottery, so come with me and let's explore Mama Ortiz Chihuahua's pottery. Now here in MO Ortiz they sometimes use commercial products to make their pottery, but as far as I could determine, all the clay they use comes from the earth. excavated locally in that area of ​​all the potters I spoke to, it seemed like they each had their own type of clay and that they used their own recipe, their own clay sources, so there may be as many different clay recipes as there are potters in this village, but all the clay they use comes from the local Earth.

Now Miguel López agreed to take me here and show me where he digs clay and this is what he is doing here, the one big mystery I never solved with Mom. Ortiz Clay is that no one seems to add temper to their clay or at least they don't seem to have knowledge of temper when I asked them about it, but this material that Miguel is digging here is very little clay, like it's sandy, no. It has some characteristic that I would look at it in nature and say it looks like clay. I want to take it to my studio and test it so that it's possible that this material is tempered, that it's just some kind of volcanic ash.

They are adding to your body of clay and maybe they don't call it temperament maybe they call it all clay even though it isn't I don't know I'm just saying I could never get a good answer about temperament this is Miguel Adelen's wife So they took me to the back of their house and explained to me all the steps they use to process the clay. Their clay body is formed by mixing clay from three different sources and they store the clay in these big containers in their garden and each of those clays are very distinctive, none of them feel especially pure and that might be the trick to not having a temper. here as these clays naturally contain a certain amount of volcanic ash or silt or some type of sand which acts as a temper when we are ready to mix a batch of clay.

The clay is placed in these large tubs covered with water and soaked. When the clay finishes soaking, it is stirred and mixed, which makes the clay particles suspended in the water temporarily okay with the suspended clay particles. In water, the material is placed in a bucket and poured through a mesh. This step is repeated over and over again adding more water to the original tub and shaking and then that material is poured through the mesh until the water is in the original. the tub has very little color it is a little transparent so you know that you have taken out most of the clay you can throw the rest in the tubs the clay settles at the bottom and the water rises to the surface this water is removed, I don't know if they skim it off the top, siphon it off or pour it out, but in either case the water is taken out of the vats, once it is the right consistency the clay is transferred to these barrels and sifted again because it could collect some impurities while in the barrel vat, it can be covered and kept clean.

This shallow cloth bucket with brick bottom and wooden sides is the final step in removing water from the clay to make it usable. When making pottery, the semi-liquid clay is covered to keep out contaminants and allowed to dry further in these trays. Finally, the clay is moved to the concrete floor of the studio to complete its drawing process. Sabino VI Alba's process for clay is very similar, although I will note that his Clay is a totally different color, he uses one ingredient in his clay instead of the three that Miguel uses and Sabino tells me that he does not add anything else to the material except that clay from whatever Source it is, now look at the form. he's filtering this through a shirt which is a very fine YES.

I can't imagine any temper material passing through that jacket and yet it doesn't add temper to your clay, so there must be something in that clay that acts as temper that is extremely fine once you put it in. In this shallow bucket, which is the same as the one Miguel uses with the bricks at the bottom, he puts a sheet and lets it dry. Gloria Hernández processes her clay in a similar but different way, she uses a screen that is not as tight as Sabino's. but it's probably tighter than Miguel's granddaughter Lesie keeps the clay stirred in the first container while pouring it through the mesh into the second container says she actually does this same process six times for each clay to make sure it's the finest and purest clay, it may be that your recipe mixes clay from two different sources and again has a slightly different color and texture than other potters.

In the end, she pours it into a wooden trough very similar to that of the other potters. and she lets it dry a little on a sheet like this. You see, northern Chihuahua was the center of the last great cultural fluorescence in the region known today as the American Southwest. There, approximately between 1250 and 1450 AD. casus grandis culture developed. that

made

some of the most beautiful ceramics of North American prehistory, types like Ramos ketas and polychrome coritos, to name just a few, have astonished and excited archaeologists and collectors alike. This culture was centered in the huge PUO RS hall called Pim, which is located about 87 South of the US-Mexico border, the culture spread from there in all directions, reaching as far south as southeastern Arizona and southwestern Mexico.

New Mexico. It is estimated that the pime contained 2,000 rooms reaching at least three stories high and numerous ceremonial architectural elements, such as platform mounds. Mounds of effigies and ball games, the works of art and crafts produced there were exquisite and included shell jewelry carved in stone, copper bells and, of course, polychrome pottery. M Ortiz is located near the heart of the Kasus grandis culture, just 20 miles south of the Pakim Many ruins. The Kasus grandis ruins are located along the Palanganas River that runs right past Monta Ortiz. The pottery that was left behind when these people left this region around 1450 AD. provided the original inspiration for Monta Ortiz pottery.

As far as the tools used to form the pottery, here at Moes we have the clay that we've already talked about, you have the water bowl that you need, we have what I would call a Pooky, what they call a mold day and generally they are formed with plaster of paris here and then you have the ubiquitous hacksaw. The blade they call sea and that Mary is using looks like a tapestry needle. I see that the most commonly used epidermal needle is M Ortiz and she also has this little plastic disc that you will see used very soon.

The Potter here is Mary Chavita and me. I'm probably messing up the pronunciation of these names, so I apologize upfront and she's working in the kitchen at her mom's house today. Her mother's name is Mon Hernandez and they were the nicest people who

made

us feel very welcome. Oh, that's a good idea, Moz potters work much like traditional Southwestern potters: they start with a flat slab of clay they call a tortilla and push it into their mold. day or Pooky, here Mary is being conscious of getting rid of any air bubbles she sees in that nice slab of pancake omelet see omelette yes, right, right, they call that omelet the same as Ito, she, yes, we call it a pancake , we call it pancake, you know, and now here you can see that you're using that green. plastic disc the same way, I would use the gour scraper to smooth the inside of the pot and press it down into that mold.

Good day, she will trim the top and wind the first coil out of it, which is very similar to the way she works. In MO Ortiz, a coil of clay is called chiso. What you'll notice here is that the size of the coils on MO Ortiz is very, very large, so it almost reminds me of when I started my channel, I was doing something called One Coil. challenge where you would see how big a pot would be that you could make with a coil of clay, so these Mo Ortiz coils are very, very large and then they spend a lot of time pinching that thinner part and pinching it as you can see they are doing here.

I've sped this up so you can see the walls of the pot go up the steps to build a pot with coils which I often give in my lessons are Bond coil pinch, scrape and repeat as needed and you can see she's going through essentially the same thing. . process here she scraped the outside now she has created a coil she is attaching it to the pot she will pinch it and you can also see as she builds she is using smaller coils when she starts to build that neck. I think there are three coils total in this. pot now, as Mary gets closer to finishing this pot, you'll notice that she doesn't spend a lot of time getting a nice smooth finish or working on the edge and that's because they sand these pots after they're completely dry and I'll go into more details in the next chapter of this video, but remember that for now at this stage you don't spend much time smoothing it because you sand later.

This discussion on MTO Ortiz Potters would not be complete if I did not at least mention the generosity of these people here we are in their house filming the pottery making and they prepare a meal for us oh s GRE, how do you say this green bean tomato? Yes, one thing that is frequently seen in mod Ortiz is clay drying. on the floor so that the clay they have already processed approaches the desired texture and consistency, it is often wrapped and placed on the floor until it dries to the proper consistency. Interesting, here we are at Sabino's house, who we met earlier. and his wife Veronica and they're working together to form a decorative plate today yeah, you'd be surprised if my clay feels like Very Yeah um animals on the leaf because oh, I've seen some of those, there's one in the house.

Where we stay, you see what he's doing. He cut out the little sheep, a very small thing, Your Arizona and um, and it has a PO, a parrot m mhm, yes, the parrot design is great, mhm, very nice, very nice and there are different inside how you can do this and Now we come to the studio of Diego VZ, who today is working on a very large vessel, but before getting into the construction of his vessel, let's look at the tools he uses. Here is Diego's toolbox and you can see some of Ma Ortiz's usual ones. tools like the hypodermic needle and what else do you have here?

Well, you have these knife blades, they probably work almost the same as the hacksaw blades that we looked at at sea and then you also have these bowls, spoons with handles cut off. which I imagine you could use inside the pot to scrape it out and then it has like a credit card cut into a round shape and what else do we have here? Oh, the ubiquitous hacksaw blade and the all-seeing piece of PVC pipe. about mod artiz for rolling out slabs and a few more spoons that are great for getting into hard to reach places, you can tell Diego makes a lot of big jars because he has some of the biggest pookies or molds I've seen anywhere, even in MO Ortiz , look at the size of these, also in Diego's studio today, it's his apprentice Alan Koo, who is also building a pretty large jar today, so we'll be going back and forth between the two of them as they build these jars.

Diego said that the clay he was using today was wetter than he wanted and that's why he continued to have problems with it because it was wetter than he would like. I think the moisture of his clay was the reason why he is using smaller coils than usual for a lot of Ortiz and also why he had to resort to a hair dryer to try to dry this pot before adding more coils to it, finally Diego and Alan had to take a break for lunch at that time I went to explore other corners of monores and when I returned a few hours later The pots were ready, weren't they beautiful?

And our last Potters who are going to show us how they build pots are Miguel and Adelene again and you will see that they work together as an unbeatable team to produce pots at a ridiculously high price. fast pace are the lightning Potters The eaves lightning speech fore fore okay, I want to spee spee almost foreign, ready, the total construction time for these two vessels that they built together was less than 17 minutes. I wasn't kidding when I called them the lightning bolt. Pows, we had some problems getting to Mama Ortiz, so when you cross the border and go more than 16 miles from the border, then there are certain procedures that you have to do, a procedure is like a tourist visa that you have to get to you yourself have permission to visit Mexico further and the second is that if you are driving a vehicle, you must obtain a pass to drive that vehicle into Mexico and you must pay a deposit for your vehicle that you will get back when you return. across the border, so when we went to get our visasas a tourist, the man behind the counter, the official realized that our passports had expired, we didn't know because they last like 10 years and then he said, well, your passport has expired and we thought.

We were going to have to cancel our entire trip and then he said, I'm going to go ahead and give you these tourist visas, but you need to figure this out before your next trip to Mexico and we said okay and we appreciate that and we went on our way, then when We went to get our truck, the P to take it down, they reviewed all the documentation that was relevant, for example, you know our registration and our insurance and all that, and then She asked to see my passport and the first thing she did was notice that that representative My passport was expired and I was denied entry.

So what were we supposed to do? We almost drove home and then I said, well look, we still have permission to visit Mexico, it's just that our truck can't go if only we could get a ride from the border to Mama Ortiz, so I talked to a friend of mine in MO Ortiz and we got someone to drive us Louise and his wife Betty took us from the border on palus uh Chihuahua there through Columbus New Mexico to mama Ortiz for a fee and then when we got here, well it's a nice little VI, so we could have walked anywhere we needed to go but it would have taken some time but it gets even better when we got here someone lent us a truck and we had wheels the whole time we were here and that's the story. about how I spent 5 days in Mexico with an expired passport, I can see a little boy of about 10 or 12 thinking this was the best thing he's ever done.

Now let's see how they finish their pots at M Ortiz once the pots have been formed and allowed to dry a little, you can take them out of the Pooky or what they call a mold and start scraping the bottom. You always have that mark where it sits in the mold at the bottom, where there's a little lip and a little edge so you can See, here Miguel is just scraping all that out and then scraping it nice and smooth, after that you let the pot to dry completely and then it's time to sand. They sand a lot at M Ortiz, that's how they get that really shiny polished finish.

I can see Mary here, she has three types of sandpaper 80 grit, 180 grit, and 220 grit, so she has to sand each pot three times with each grade of sandpaper to get it nice and smooth, and that's before I start polishing or painting, so I don't have many videos of the sanding process because there really isn't much to show, just sanding the pot, it's the most boring mundane task involved in making ma Ortiz Pottery. Once sanded, you can move on to the polishing step, which I promise is fascinating. So here Veronica is applying oil to the sanded and dried pot, in this case she is using furniture oil, but here at M Ortiz they use many different types of oil, after covering it with oil, wait a minute for it to absorb and absorb. not much, maybe a minute or two at most and then she applies water to it, so here's a rag with water that she can see, she just puts the water right on top of it and then again gives it a minute.

So that that absorbs and doesn't have excess water on the surface, you can see that he uses this cloth to buff off the excess water and then he starts polishing with a smooth stone and you can see that the ceramic develops a really beautiful finish, almost like a mirror. Immediately when you start polishing for the fire as a prefire, sometimes we put it in there first, as Gloria uses a similar process to polish her large Oyá, but because it is so large, she has to do it in stages, so first we nothing covers the entire pot with oil in this case she is using an oil made to treat saddle leather once the pot is completely covered in oil she has to wait a few minutes for the oil to soak into the pot before start polishing to soak in mhm see Yes ok then add water but instead of covering the entire surface like Veronica did it covers just a small area that you can polish at a time and then you go ahead and make the pot in stages , so using a sponge just apply a little bit of water and then using a larger sponge helps dry it and remove any excess before you start polishing.

To start, she does a kind of rough polishing using this engine pushrod and then once she has everything covered, she sets it aside and picks up. She picks up a soft rock to do the final polishing after that area is completely polished, she takes her sponge and water, wets a new area and starts the process again this way, in stages, she slowly goes around the entire pot. the one where you put the diesel in the diesel Penta s Mangano e graphite no manganes bar e manganes look simple manganese, that's a recipe I know well, so in case you missed that exchange, I first covered the pot with a liberal layer of diesel fuel and I didn't catch that on camera but it's no big deal, you just covered it with diesel using that sponge in the cup right there and then waited a couple of minutes for it to dry completely, now you're applying a coat of manganese and Clay mixed with water and now you are applying that with a sponge all over the pot and this is basically a slip.

I haven't seen many slips used on MA Ortiz, but this is a slip if it's just clay and manganese. The interesting thing is that it doesn't give it two layers, it doesn't make it especially heavy. I mean, when it's over, as you'll see, you can still see through it a little bit, but it gives it a black blackness and then it's gone. to add a little bit more blackness to it in a minute here MH see, say graphite again, yeah see, this is powdered graphite that they get commercially somewhere, so she's adding this to the container and she's going to mix it with diesel, so in this little one I think it's a Gatorade bottle, it has a little bit of diesel fuel in it, so you mix the graphite with the diesel and then this is applied to the pot on top of that manganese and clay that was already added.

Wow, look at that look, it just comes to life. Wow, incredible. I have manganese as a base layer and then graphite on top. I simply mix the graphite together and cover once this step is complete wait at least another 20 minutes for it to dry completely before starting to polish it. I'm on the side of the road near Kasas Grandes Chihuahua and if there's one thing I know what to look for and it's a clay quarry, so there's a place on the side of the road here that's all dug out of this bank. Now I was looking for clay.

I was thinking about clay when I was down here, all the soil around here is that reddish brown color that doesn't look anything like the color of rl's polychrome, so I thought, I kept thinking where that thing comes from and crossing this little hill and this whole bank is dug up. The potters have been here digging The potters have been here digging recently, you can even see marks, you know where a tool has been working, a pickaxe or something like that, it's cool, it's easy to find these little spots when you look for it. Someone has been digging and then stopped and it's a good sign that there is clay anyway, quite interesting, white, it's definitely clay too, you can see by the texture of its slightly crunchy angular bits, it's also very very ashy , but it's definitely interesting clay. things this has to be, I mean, it may not be the exact source, but it's something like this that they were using for the branch polychrome.

Interesting, after having collected a bag of this clay, I took it to my accommodation in MA Ortiz and gave it a little test. I put it in a container, put a little water on top so I could see how much clay there was. I let it soak for a few hours and then ran it through my fingers to see what the texture and color was like. The results are that it definitely has a lot of clay but it also has a lot of sand. The way they process the clay here at M Ortiz would definitely clean this up and make it usable.

How usable, I had no way of saying it. I was delighted that I took the entire bag of clay home, but Customs does not allow raw unprocessed clay to cross the border, it has to be processed and I did not have time in the few days left on my trip to process an entire bag. of clay, so I left it in MA Ortiz, but the most important thing for me, being a replica of Ator, was that I had found a white clay near the ruins of pime, which you know is important or very important to me , so I found this corn grinder there. similar to what I use to grind clay except they don't use it to grind clay they don't dry process their clay they use the corn grinder to make paint so this is the native manganese they use here they grind it up and mix it .

They make it with clay and I don't know if there are other ingredients or not. I don't really know, but they make paint themselves with natural manganese that they harvest in the local area and that is really the basis of their fine painting. The other thing. What is important for your painting are these brushes. They make these brushes themselves from small children's hair, so very young children have super fine hair which makes them the best brushes for painting. All the potters I observed painting in mod Ortiz used all these handmade ones. hair brushes for children now let's see an example of these brushes and this paint used together here is Sabino and he is about to start painting that plate that we saw Veronica polishing recently okay M look yes manganese look mango she very quickly I paint much more slow that mhm scrapes it off, yeah, uhhuh, I think if I did that with my paint, I would spread it all over the pot, the soap keeps it from staining, no, uhh.

José and Celia are two artists at MA Ortiz who make very fine and detailed paintings. Pots, as you can see here, this type of painting takes hours to complete, but the results speak for themselves. Now you can notice that the color of the clay body is black. This is not a slip, it is actually made with black clay and the reason is that it adds manganese directly to the clay which is a pretty good idea, on the other hand manganese is toxic to inhale so think about these pots , when you sand them, there is manganese in the air, you would like to have a good respirator or you know you might not even have one. around when you sand one of these manganese pots, but they paint on this black clay with bright colors, in this case red and white, but in other cases they use commercial glazes on some of these, so you will see blues, greens, yellows and colors. which are not natural but really make a beautiful eye-catching pot with these bright colors on the black background.

These are finished pots that are dry and are waiting to be sanded, polished and painted once the designs are outlined in the black manganese paint and then in To make the traditional polychrome kasus grandis between those black lines is filled with red paint, like You see Veronica here now making a clay to make the red and yellow paint, but when it shoots it's red mhm, yes, the color of the chain is super soft, so we feel so much pain and that lubricates it so it doesn't scratch, yes , mhm, the last common design technique at M Ortiz that we will look at today is scfo, there is a surprising amount of beautiful scraffito work being done at MA Ortiz today and as you can see, this pot was painted with commercial glazes, you don't get those blues and greens from natural materials and then she scrapes them off which really provides more definition to the design and really makes them pop, how did she do that?

The tradition of making pottery began in MA Ortiz in the first place, well, it's the same old story. The boy finds ceramic shirts. The boy falls in love with ancient Ceramics. The boy decides that he is going to try to recreate some of the Pottery boy's obsession with Pottery. Change the course of. It has happened to many people throughout their lives, I know people like John Olssen and Tony Sorz and even me and it happened to a man named Juan Kaza who grew up in MA Ortiz and said that in the 1950s when he was still a teenager .

He began experimenting with local clays and minerals to try to reproduce the beautiful old kasas grandis pottery that was found in that area and, with the way that sort of thing works, it took him a lot of experimentation and trial and error to achieve. success, but by the early 1970s he was creating convincing replicas of ancient kasus Grandes ceramic vessels for which he found a ready market among collectors north of the border. Juan's success inspired others in town to try pottery. He taught what he had learned to friends and family. Others started. Making his own experiments with local clays and minerals In 1976, an anthropologist named Spencer McCallum bought some of Juan's pottery at a junk shop in Deming, New Mexico, then traveled south to Hua, trying to track down who had made the vessels that took it to WAN kaz.

At the door of the house, the two men reached an agreement whereby Spencer would pay Juan to make pots. This allowed Juan the freedom to experiment and improve at his craft without the financial pressure of having to make pots quickly. In the 1980s, the quality of the ceramics coming out of M. Ortiz increased rapidly as did the number of active potters in the town. It is estimated that in the late 1980s there were around 300 potters working in the village at any one time.that the notoriety of M Ortiz Pottery was increasing rapidly in the United States and beyond.

People started collecting it since then, the quality of the pottery made here has continued to improve and today pottery is made in every corner of the town. Imagine being a young man growing up in a pottery town like Mama Ortiz, you wouldn't need to go through all the experiments and trials and errors that early pioneers like Juan Kaza had to do, the same goes for the ceramics industry in the United States , there is always a family friend, an uncle or an aunt who is willing to teach you what you need. I need to know to start, but for those of us interested in making traditional pottery who are not in pottery communities like that, the road to progress can be winding and the learning curves steep, this is the advantage of the old Potters Club , is like a virtual Village of more experienced potters who are willing and able to help you progress.

We meet on Zoom every week to make pottery together and post tips and questions through our Discord community throughout the week. I can be like your weird old pottery maker uncle. who helps you with your pottery skills, join the old potters club and call me with Andy. I'll put the link up here and down in the duo in case you're interested in learning more about the old Potter's Club Sabino. He's here this afternoon preparing that beautiful dish we saw in his studio. Earlier in the day, so this is what I would call the primary fire, he's just heating everything up and ready to go, oh how pretty, oh no, this one is different, look, he doesn't see that different, yeah, yeah, like maybe this school with that, okay.

Try, thank you, what do you say, gabri Gabriella? It may seem like when you watch the video everything is happening pretty fast, but these steps went on quite a bit, so everything is heating up very slowly, so first they heated this metal tub for a while then they put the plate inside and left it. heat up for quite a while, so now that you see them stacking the fuel, the dish has already been there for a while, so it's really had a lot of time to slowly preheat. this fire before they start feeding it, so the fuel here is mainly cow dung, but some pieces of broken poplar are added, very good, yes, look, and then the cooling period is also equally long, which you let it sit here even after you take the fuel out of it, you let it sit here in this tub for a long time before you open it.

Now here's a look inside Sabino and Veronica's studio just to see some of the pots they made today, all sitting here dry. So you've had a very busy day. Now we let this cool with the lid on for quite some time. Now he is removing the cover. You will still let it cool a little more before removing it from the bathtub. you're letting the cooling happen very slowly because you don't want to break it, so when you finally take it out it's already nighttime, so the whole process took quite a while to complete, heating it up slowly and cooling it down slowly.

That's great, that has the heart there, very cool, that's how I met Mary. I was driving down the road and I saw someone shooting Pottery so I stopped and talked to them so this is a fire spot for Blackwar so you see this tray of horse manure here he probably put some of that in under the sagger before lighting the fire, that way it carbonizes, heats up, creates a smoke atmosphere there and the pots under the sagger will be impregnated with that carbon, turning them black, so I will see that on top of the pots there is a big metal tub that's sitting on the floor so no air can get in because she's trying to stain the pots and now she's letting it cool down very slowly so once the fire burns the coals she removes them and then you leave them for a few minutes to sit there and cool themselves slowly, then you'll come in and remove the dirt and then let them sit and cool. a little bit more just trying to prevent that thermal shock by letting it cool down nice and slow and finally once you think it's cooled down enough you're going to take two pieces of spruce wood and lift that drop and finally we can see the beautiful black pottery below.

I'm really on the usual kind of diet, so it's my fault, we've been very lucky because the weather during our trip was really good, which, you know, for a trip in January can be really unpredictable, as you can see. It's raining today, but we've had four really beautiful days, so today is the day we're getting ready to leave. We have made great friends here. The people of this Village have been very warm, welcoming and friendly. they took us to their houses they fed us they gave us things they just made us feel welcome today Louis is on his way here he will pick us up and take us back to the border if you liked this video about how they make pottery.

Here at M Ortiz I have made other videos that have to do with how different groups in the southwest make pottery, so you may enjoy this one here about how the hopes make pottery. I appreciate you coming on our journey with us today. you next time