🎧 Skin, Bones, and Soul: Jarre à la Corde from Ancient to Contemporary Practice Benjamin Oswald

Appears in the January 2026 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

There is a certain romance about visiting a remote location in France to learn about an obscure ceramic technique that is emerging in the North American, Asian, and Australian ceramics contexts. Jarre à la corde is a technique that has been used traditionally in Europe for building multiples of large ceramic vessels and can also be applied to the fabrication of forms for sculptural works. A series of wooden ribs is mounted around the center axis of a pottery wheel and wrapped with rope. Soft clay is posited on the surface of the rope and further shaped. When the clay has reached the right stage of dryness, the wooden ribs and rope are extracted from the interior of the form, leaving a clay vessel. By varying the rib shape and scale, this technique can be employed to create a variety of vessel designs, the size of the kiln being one of the only limiting factors (1).

After spending several days in Paris researching ceramic works at the Louvre, I boarded the TGV (France’s high-speed rail service) to Nancy, located in the north-eastern region of France. Upon arrival, I located my rental apartment in a block of buildings dating back to the 15th century and, after unlocking several sets of doors using large keys, gained access to a narrow circular staircase, which smelled of damp stone. My flat was on the third floor, with the building conveniently located next to the main shopping areas and the city square. As I settled in, bells began to ring out over the square from a nearby cathedral. I came to Nancy to complete a short internship at the Centre Professionnel International de formation aux Arts Céramiques (CPIFAC) in Velaine-en-Haye, a forested location just outside Nancy. My purpose was to work with artists in the technique of jarre à la corde. 

The Skin 

My practice involves the creation of vessels and sculpture, and is an examination of their spaces and interactions. Ceramic vessels have a well-developed vocabulary referencing the human body. For example, a vase may have a foot, a belly, a shoulder, or a neck. I am interested in the ceramic vessel’s symbolic connection to the body. For me, creating vessels is like creating people, where dynamic associations and relationships can be considered. Like many ceramic artists, I use the pottery wheel, handbuild using coils and slabs, slip cast with molds, or use press molds to create vessels and objects to communicate what I’m thinking about. When I do this, I feel like I’m using the clay to fashion the physical skin of the objects I’m bringing into existence.

The Bones 

The day I arrived was a bank holiday. As such, the buses from Nancy to Velaine-en-Haye were very infrequent, so I hired an Uber to get me to the CPIFAC studio site. As the Uber driver and I entered the forest of Velaine-en-Haye, the slight rain and cool temperatures created a fog that made identifying buildings a bit tricky. The driver looked nervous dropping me off in a location that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. That said, CPIFAC is comprised of three buildings on the remote site that served as part of a US Air Force base during WWII. I was warmly greeted at CPIFAC with pastries and tea before getting to work. 

While the practice of jarre à la corde often lends itself to the production of symmetrical shapes, I went to CPIFAC to specifically push what I could do with the technique by attempting asymmetrical forms with concave parts (2–9). Each vessel is an engineering challenge and the wooden structures themselves are art. To my mind, the wooden ribs look like the skeletal structure for a vessel worthy to be featured at the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée (Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy Galleries at the National Museum of Natural History) in Paris and have also served as sculptural inspirations in my work. 

From Ancient to Contemporary 

The origins of jarre à la corde are not entirely clear. Some sources say they originate from the Neolithic ages, where the peoples of Turkey used baskets as forms for positing clay on top to give support for the vessel. Others point to the ancient Egyptians, who used plant roots and papyrus to create a core that clay could be structured around. CPIFAC noted that during the Hellenistic period, wooden barrels served as an inner structure for supporting clay and shared evidence for the large dolia from Roman times being created similarly, but in combination with a jig and wooden spinner. In my view, this history is in need of an academic deep dive. Still, sources generally point to Biot, a city on the Mediterranean coast of France, that became one of the predominant centers for the production of large jars from the 16th to the late 19th centuries. The Augé-Laribé family from Biot is credited with innovating these traditional techniques at the beginning of the 20th century into the practice of jarre à la corde that exists today. 

A simple internet search can reveal potters demonstrating the jarre à la corde technique as they manufacture large vessels. Many are from the Mediterranean or Basque regions of France. However, the number of artists who employ this technique for ceramic art and sculpture is growing, and not just in France. With the help of emergent technologies in the production of ceramic objects, new methodologies are coming together to assist artists who want to venture into new places, specifically using jarre à la corde. 

In a recent collaboration at the International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics at Medalta (Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada), assistant professor Bryan Cera (assistant professor of object making and emergent technologies at the Alberta University for the Arts in Calgary, Alberta, Canada) and I looked at how this technique could be further refined and contextualized in a modern practice by using CAD software and CNC routers. Using these technologies, jarre à la corde bases and wooden templates could be cut with precision, the geometry and engineering of the cogs and ribs were greatly simplified, and required a fraction of the time to make (10–12). 

To bring a modern twist to the traditional jarre à la corde pottery technique, Bryan developed an algorithm that generates parametric blueprints for the wooden frameworks. This approach leverages computational design to allow customization and even randomization of the jar silhouette, creating a generative design process. This parametric approach ensures flexibility while maintaining structural integrity. By systematically deconstructing and sorting geometries at various stages, the algorithm adapts seamlessly to parameter changes, enabling robust, non-destructive edits. 

These contributions add to an important contemporary evolution of the technique and move beyond mere production of vessels for commercial enterprise by serving as a means of creating new art. 

The Soul 

While the exterior of a vessel is well defined, the inside of the vessel is not, and is frequently referred to as the void or a place to fill. One of the questions in my work looks at the void and what is (or was) there or what we imagine to be there. In this way, I ask questions about the interference between surface and void, light and darkness, and body and soul as a means of exploring the concept of inner space. To do so, I physically cut my vessels open to peer inside them. In opening the vessel, I can reveal the texture the rope leaves within the clay interior and imagine a search for the vessel’s soul or some ultimate essence teetering in between the form itself and the void it contains. 

When I look deeply at these vessels, I feel like I’m peering into a doorway, a liminal space between two worlds. Magdalene Odundo DBE once described part of her making process, expressing concern should one of her vessels break, and the inside become visible. She described that interior space as “. . .the womb for all my thoughts and imagination. It’s the healer’s storage space . . . for feelings and emotions that inform the outside.” So, when I open up my vessels and illuminate them or place objects within them, I feel I can give shape to something much more closely tied to what I imagine and consider sacred. Thus, these vessels become locations for me to ask existential questions as unanswerable as they might appear to be. What I have found in the process is that the technique of jarre à la corde, specifically my contemporary interpretation of it, is an important means of scaling up and creating multiples of vessels while still allowing all the subtle nuance for the expression of ideas. 

the author Benjamin Oswald received an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. He works as a professional artist and arts educator, teaching ceramics at the University of Alberta. He is based in Treaty 6 Territory, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To see more, visit www.benjaminoswald.ca. 

January 2026: Table of Contents

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