Overview
Hand-built pottery among the Gwari people of central Nigeria, in the area around Abuja and Niger State, is a women's craft producing water jars, cooking pots and storage vessels, and it is the tradition from which Nigeria's best-known twentieth-century potter came.
Origin and history
Pottery in the region is long established, made and sold by women for household use. In the mid-twentieth century a pottery training centre was set up at Abuja, in what is now the Federal Capital Territory, where the British potter Michael Cardew worked with local potters, and it was there that Ladi Kwali, already an established Gwari potter, combined her hand-built forms with wheel and glaze techniques. Her work was exhibited internationally, and her name is now among the most widely recognised in Nigerian ceramics. Hand-built pottery continues in the area alongside studio work.
Materials and techniques
Vessels are built without a wheel. Clay is dug locally, cleaned and kneaded, then formed by pinching and coiling or by pressing clay over a mould, and the walls are thinned and shaped with a paddle and a pebble. Surfaces are burnished, incised with combs and roulettes and decorated with animal, plant and geometric motifs, and the pots are fired in open or pit firings fuelled with grass and wood. Studio work from the Abuja centre added the potter's wheel, stoneware clay and glazes to this repertoire.
Cultural significance
Large water jars were essential household equipment, and a potter's reputation rested on the balance, thinness and finish of her pots as well as their decoration. The craft gave women independent income and was passed from mother to daughter. The meeting of this tradition with studio ceramics at Abuja also shaped how Nigerian pottery was seen internationally.
Notable examples
Ladi Kwali
Gwari potter whose hand-built and later glazed work brought Nigerian pottery international attention.
Abuja Pottery Training Centre
Mid-twentieth-century centre where local potters worked alongside studio techniques.
Burnished water jars
Large hand-built vessels with incised and roulette-stamped decoration.
Connected history and culture
The potter most associated with the tradition has her own page under notable people, and the household vessels it produced overlap in use with those described in calabash carving.