Slide 7: Convex Mold Technique II - Pounding out Pot

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The pancake of clay is placed on the rounded surface of the mold and the potter begins to pound the fresh clay thin with a wooden paddle or a flat stone. As the clay becomes thinner it spreads out to cover the entire upper surface of the mold pot. The potter slowly backs around the growing pot, making it thinner and thinner until the widest point of the mold has been reached. She then trims and evens the lower edge of the new pot and begins another. The molded pots are allowed to dry briefly and then removed from the molds by two potters and placed rim downwards on the ground where they may dry and shrink without cracking.

When the pots are stiff enough to be handled without warping they are turned rim upward and placed in a support formed, for example, by a dish of dry wood ash, that supports and retains the rounded shape of the bottom of the pot. Many potters stop work at this stage after smoothing the rim of the molded pot. Their pots are entirely molded and are always widest at the rim. Other potters enlarge their pots by adding coils or sausages of fresh clay to the rim of the molded section, increasing the size of the pot by as much as a third, and narrowing the neck of the pot so that its widest dimension is at the belly rather than at the rim. This variant technique is simply a combination of two major pottery forming techniques in Africa , the convex mold technique and the coil technique, to form one pot.

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