Archive · 2015 · From the print edition of Friday 6 November 2015, Vol. 23, No. 7,091
CultureMedieval glazes, modern hands
In a Talas workshop, Chynara Mamytova has spent nearly two decades relearning how the potters of the Samanid and Kara-Khanid towns painted their bowls.
TALAS — The bowls on the shelves of Chynara Mamytova's workshop look as if they had been lifted from an excavation trench. Their cream and black grounds, thin red lines and looping Arabic-script inscriptions belong to the slip-painted earthenware made in the towns of the Talas and Chu valleys between the 9th and 12th centuries, under the Samanids and the Kara-Khanids. Ms. Mamytova, 43, made them this year.
She began in the late 1990s, after seeing sherds of such ware excavated at medieval sites in the two valleys. "I could not understand how a colour mixed a thousand years ago could still be so bright," she said. Since then she has mixed her slips from local clays and mineral pigments, following laboratory analyses of excavated sherds, and has thrown away, by her own count, far more pieces than she has kept.
Her bowls and plates are decorated with birds, with the eight-pointed star and with inscriptions in Arabic script that she copies from medieval pieces, most of them short sayings about generosity and patience. A selection is on show in Clay and Script: Contemporary Ceramics after the Silk Road, the exhibition at the Irad Palace of Art in Iyık Janyl, where her work hangs a few rooms away from the foundation's collection of medieval Silk Road ceramics.