Ceramics
To create my ceramic, I combined two tutorials from The Girl’s Own Paper that frame the practice of terracotta decoration through the arts and crafts of ancient cultures.
First, I followed the advice to “Honey” in the “Answers to Correspondents” section of The Girl's Own Paper (above) The author encourages readers to create Egyptian outlines on paper and paste them onto terracotta jars. This collage technique allows readers to piece together their own version of the ancient vases on display in museums (click here to view a Greek amphora in the British Museum).
I remediated Mrs. Holman Hunt’s article from The Girl’s Own Paper (above) to illustrate the entanglement of ancient Egypt and girls’ craft culture. As seen in the Kidman sisters' autograph albums (which can be viewed digitally here), children's collages came in many forms, including scrapbooking—a popular Victorian activity across ages, genders, and occupations.
To learn more about scrapbooks in the University of Victoria's Special Collections and University Archives visit Elizabeth Bassett's digital exhibit, "Yes, this is my album."
In her article "Marks of Possession: Methods for an Impossible Subject" Karen Sánchez-Eppler explores how ninteenth-century children repurposed their reading material through collage. She observes that "many nineteenth-century children used print culture to claim space and express their pleasures and taste" (152). Materials for such crafts often came from periodicals, which were cheaper and more accessible than bound novels.
For readers of The Girl's Own Paper interested in Egypt, Hunt’s article supplies plenty of space to "express their pleasures and taste" (Sánchez-Eppler 152). The rising popularity of ancient Egyptian art and culture corresponds with the growth of archaeology as a discipline, so the publication of an article full of "discoveries" was not uncommon (to learn more about archaeology in the Victorian era click here). However, in The Girl's Own Paper, the bite-sized recreations of Egyptologist W.M. Petrie’s discoveries in “the Fayum, Egypt” encourage collage through their layout: the white space around the illustrations, the lack of text, and the small handwritten descriptions of colour or material (see "gold" on the left) invites readers to cut, colour, and paste. I printed scans of this article onto homemade paper, which has more texture and natural colour than printer paper. I cut up my chosen artifacts and decoupaged these scraps onto a jar, using the "papyrus wrapped jar" image (below) as a reference.
Second, I drew on the oil painting techniques from an article titled “Terra-Cotta Painting” by Mary Randolph-Lichfield in The Girl's Own Paper (above). Striking recreations of Graeco-Roman ceramics take up most of the page. However, Randolph-Lichfield not only discusses pottery in terms of its Greek design but also weaves the history of tomb vases and terracotta vessels from Egypt and even Etruscan tombs throughout her guide to painting on this surface. She writes, “in many Etruscan tombs vases 2,000 years old have been found still bright in colour, stainless, and uninjured” (294).
Etruscan, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian cultures often appear grouped together in the periodical press. In her article “Reconstructing Ancient Worlds: Reception Studies, Archaeological Representation and the Interpretation of Ancient Egypt,” Stephanie Moser argues that such combination was deliberate from the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century:“[making associations between Etruscan, Graeco-Roman, and Egyptian cultures] communicated a clear message about Egyptian art, suggesting that it was part of the story of classical art.… Such receptions projected the idea that ancient Egypt, although exotic, was connected to Western art and had a place in its development” (1295). Including references to ancient Egypt in an article that teaches girls how to paint in a "Western style" not only reduces the individuality of past civilizations into an ethnocentric vision of classic art but also enacts that message through the act of recreation.
Collage preserves ephemeral paper goods and moments of life that would otherwise be lost to time. Creating a collage ceramic with this article demonstrates readers’ opportunities for domestic museum making within girls’ print material.
