Amazing Pottery

can pottery clay be made out of Georgia red clay dirt?

if so how or a website with info would be great .thanks in advance!

Public Comments

1. There is a tradition of handmade pottery in Georgia, using the native red clay. The only clay mine/mill/factory that I personally know about in Georgia is in Lizella GA, which isn't too far from Macon. I think that it is off of Exit 3 on I-475, which is also the exit for Macon State College. Lizella clay is a red clay which is sold in art supply stores in the Atlanta and Athens areas, and probably throughout the South. It is known for its workability, and for air drying to a fairly hard state without kiln-firing. It doesn't work as well as some clays when thrown on a wheel, so it is mainly used for sculpture as well as coil and slab formation and pinch pots. It is typically used in local schools for these purposes. I have visited the only facility left in Lizella where it is dug from the earth and crushed and screened to purify it for use. You can buy it quite cheaply on site, and because it is a local product it is normally one of the least expensive clays in Georgia art supply and ceramics shops. If you live in Georgia and are interested in digging clay out of your own backyard to make pots I don't have much advice for you. I'm lazy and let the folks at Lizella do all of the digging and refining for me. I did see in Lizella the large machines they used for digging, crushing, screening, and rehydrating the clay, but I'm sure that in the past this was all done by hand. This site has a brief description of the process... http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/ASK/clays.html "Processing clay involves open pit mining and pulverizing the claystone so that it will pass through a sieve with a particular mesh size, such as 90% being retained on a 200 mesh screen (0.074mm openings) with the largest particle being retained on a 30-mesh screen (0.59mm openings). In other cases, the material may have to be pulverized to 99.9% finer than the 325 mesh (0.044mm). All commercial clays are produced in this method. Clays are thus not purified from soils for use." This was what I saw in Lizella. They didn't just dig up some red clay soil, which is mixed with a lot of other junk. They had veins of pure, hardened clay that they dug up, pulverized into powder, screened through various sized meshes, and then mixed with water to produce usable clay. Here is a link which describes the process on a smaller scale, (PDF file)... http://www.baileypottery.com/pdf/ProcessingClayTheEasyWay.pdf I tried digging some clay out of the bed of the stream behind our house when I was kid, and forming it into little pinch pots and people. It wasn't very pretty when it dried, and it cracked pretty badly because there was a lot of sand and little pebbles mixed in, and some organic material. If I were going to try it again, knowing what I do now, I'd probably try to locate the purest vein of moist clay that I could, dig up a few buckets full, take it home and dump it all into a big tub and mix it with water to make a slip. Then I'd pour it through some screens to get out all of the impurities, and let the slip settle and separate, and get rid of the excess water by scooping as much as I could off of the top, and through evaporation. I probably wouldn't end up with the best quality clay when I was done, but it might be interesting to try. Wait... here's a web site showing and telling how people used pretty much the same process. I hope that this will help you... http://www.goshen.edu/art/DeptPgs/rework.html