Posbank — Dry valley
In the makingNow: On the wheel
Made by Martijn
Price to follow
Save to PinterestHand-thrown mug with the relief of the dry valleys in the slope of the Posbank.
- Dishwasher safe
- Dimensions: 8 cm high · 7 cm wide · 300 ml
Specifications
- Made by
- Martijn
- Height
- 8 cm
- Width
- 7 cm
- Capacity
- 300 ml
Care
Dishwasher safe.
Every piece is made and glazed by hand; small differences in colour and shape are part of it. Wash with a soft sponge and avoid abrasive cleaners. Don't take the piece from very cold to very hot in one go.
The story of this piece
On the wheel (current step)
31 October
Finishing (not yet)
Bisque fired (not yet)
Glazed, in the kiln (not yet)
Available (not yet)
Clay has a mind of its own: whether this piece survives the kiln and how the glaze turns out, we only know once it's finished.
About this piece
Halfway down the steep slope of the Posbank, between 45 and 65 metres above NAP, the landscape is at its most pronounced. Narrow valleys cut into the flank like fingers, with the odd small hill in between. These dry valleys formed in the last ice age. The ground was frozen then, so meltwater could not sink away and found its way down over the surface instead. No water flows there now, but the shape has remained.
The heights come from the Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland. From a strip 1.2 kilometres long and 360 metres wide, I made contour lines every 5 metres. I carve the bottom two layers by hand out of the wall, and build up the top three with slabs of clay 1 millimetre thick. Hold the mug and you can feel the valleys under your fingers.
The photo with the map shows exactly which stretch of the Posbank runs around this mug.
From the Posbank series
Five mugs, five sections of the same push moraine: from the pavilion at the top to the foot of the slope.
Read more about this series
I live close to the Veluwezoom, and the Posbank is a familiar landscape to me. My mugs are often inspired by my own photos of buildings, technology and nature. With this series I wanted to go a step further: not a photo of the landscape, but the shape of the landscape itself.
The shape of the relief is not invented. It is measured. The Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland (AHN) maps the whole of the Netherlands with laser scans from aircraft, accurate to half a metre. Buildings and trees are filtered out, leaving only the bare ground surface. This data is public and free to use via PDOK.
From that elevation data I made contour lines every 5 metres. Each contour line becomes a layer of 1 millimetre of clay, and every mug has five of them. I carve the bottom two layers by hand out of the wall of the mug. The top three I build up with thin slabs of clay, which I cut to size on the mug. Each mug shows a strip 1.2 kilometres long and about 360 metres wide, running once around the mug. Because 1 millimetre of clay equals 5 metres of height, the relief is almost true to scale.
The five mugs: Pavilion (77–98 m NAP), West flank (55–75 m), East flank (55–75 m), Dry valley (45–65 m) and Foot (35–55 m).
The Posbank is a push moraine. It formed in the penultimate ice age, some 150,000 years ago, when the ice sheet pushed the ground up here. The dry valleys in the slope formed later: while the ground was frozen, meltwater carved them out.
