Meditations on Mortaria Storiel Bangor 2024 – 2025

The Meditations on Mortaria 2024 series was inspired by the fragment of a Roman grinding bowl excavated from Segontium, Caernarfon, in the National Museums of Wales Collection, Storiel, Bangor. 

The object immediately made connections for me with my own work, with the grinding bowl I had brought back from my time as a post graduate University student in Ghana, as well as with Celtic sites I had visited, such as Tre’r Ceiri hillfort Llanaelhaearn. 

I took key features from the Roman fragment as my starting point:  the shallow bowl, pouring spout, gritted grinding surface, and pestle.  I was interested in exploring these, not in order to recreate the original or to produce functional objects, but to meditate on shape, material, and process. 

Using wood-fired terracotta vessels which I had brought back from Ghana as hump moulds, I played with form using porcelain and terra cotta to produce shallow bowls with single, double, and some treble pouring spouts.

I used materials such as sand, beach shale, eggshells, and even metal, to create a variety of roughened surfaces. 

Other materials embedded in the bowls such as coal coke, rice, barley, and red sorrel created indentations and patterning. 

I also experimented with other materials such as sifted wood ash rolled directly onto the clay which changed the overall colour of the vessel surfaces.