Exploring Southern Pottery with Ai
written by Robert Matheson
The air is clean and fresh. The scent of southern magnolia trees fills the air as each flower blooms with a white spice that reminds you of incense. The smell of fresh-cut grass wafts through the windows, each blade freshly trimmed. The clanging of hammers and anvils, pots and pans banging against each other. Grindstones and whetstones screeching against metal. Nails and screws pounding into wood.
Beside an old barn sits a man kicking a pottery wheel. His callous hands press firmly against a rising vessel of gritty red clay. Bang! A horse in the stall behind him kicks the rickety wood boards causing the man to flinch. The jug he so painstakingly fashioned has partially collapsed. The strange folds remind him of a face. Is it his father? His brother?
His mind flexes and strains. He recalls his grandmother carrying sculpted clay pots to the family grave. The grotesque clay faces would help "keep the evil spirits away", she said.
He can barely remember the village of his birth. He can hardly recall his siblings or any of his extended family. His imagination runs wild as he tries to capture his memories in clay.
The story above is a dramatization of the original face jug artisans in the South. Who knows where it started or who created the first jug? The origins are lost to the brutality of an unjust time. Men and women of color were not allowed to read or write during the days of slavery, leaving the majority of their work unsigned and undated. There are a few exceptions like Dave the Potter from Edgefield, South Carolina (http://leonardtodd.com/david-drake39s-life_283.html) but his inscriptions of poetry and scripture are an exception to the very harsh rules enforced by slavers of the South.
The global tradition of pottery with faces dates back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. At the time of this writing the oldest known smiley face on a jug was found in Turkey over, estimated to be over 3,700 years old (https://www.zmescience.com/science/smiley-jug-first-awesome). But what of the Southern face jugs? One theory suggests they were used as grave markers by slaves, meant to ward off evil spirits so the soul of the deceased could make it to heaven.
I first discovered face jugs at an antique shop in Newberry, South Carolina. Fascinating, grotesque faces fired in clay. Some coated in colorful glazes, others gritty and muted. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this type of pottery is the unique expression of each hand thrown piece. Each sculpture tells a story. One-of-a-kind. 1of1.
The first face jug in my series of Ai artwork was selected because of its likeness to "Arty", the name of the mark used by Newberry County artists & makers. The historical design is inscribed in the moulding of the Old Newberry Hotel. The meaning however, like the origin of the Southern face jug, is lost to time. We now use it to help identify arts and crafts that are produced in Newberry County. We call this group of artists Newberry Made.
With midjourney Ai, you can pass in image urls to be used as reference photos. I began to feed "Arty" directly into the prompts with surprisingly good results.
Continuing on with the series, we see the influence of African and Asian inspired face jugs entering the collection. A far departure from the Southern style but beautiful and intriguing examples of the diversity made possible by the use of these tools.
All of the face jugs you've seen are created using midjourney. After a week of struggling with text and direct image prompts, I received access to Dall-E. My first image prompt using a reference photograph of an IRL Southern face jug from the mid 1800's produced the following piece. Not a perfect image but far more accurate to the intended style.
This series continues to unfold as I explore multiple Ai technologies to produce outputs that accurately reflect the Southern face jug tradition while also attempting to develop a contemporary aesthetic of my own. You can [view and purchase these face jugs by visiting my ARTificial collection on objkt https://objkt.com/collection/KT1MtabaNiEMGkdwRqnbLYeaWoNPJkLBoUZA. #newberrymade #NewberryIsAnArtTown