Some of my favorite items to come out of my pit firing are my ocarinas made out of the molds I made of prehistoric shark’s teeth. As a child, my husband collected shark’s teeth from what is now Parkdale subdivision in Charleston, SC. They were fairly large - up to five inches in length, but generally not fragmentary. So before making the plaster molds of these, I filled in the gaps of the shark’s teeth with plasticine clay, trying to mimic the shark tooth texture and shape as I went along. So I guess one could say that these shark’s teeth came from both the Miocene as well as the plasticine era.
For these shark teeth ocarinas, I kept one side with the texture of the original tooth, then added a smoother top on the reverse side from which to hollow out the finger holes. I’ve pictured both sides for comparison. Some teeth were burnished straight on the clay body before firing and others have three coats of terra sigillata on them - like the white one. The white one has the best sound. At some point, I’ll upload a sound video so it can be heard.
No comments:
Post a Comment