On the Run

On the Run

A temporary display of student art by Miriam Mitchell

Our students are very talented – and Miriam Mitchell is no exception. In the second year of a degree in Classics at Fitzwilliam College, she made the two vases in this display inspired by the shape, style and iconography of Athenian pottery. Graham Taylor, an experimental archaeologist who specialises in making replicas using ancient techniques, helped her to explore throwing, firing and decorating a pot to replicate the Athenian black-figure technique.

Miriam's vases are versions of Panathenaic amphorae, vessels which were made as vessels which were made as prizes to be given to the winners of the Panathenaic Games, an athletic competition which was held at Athens every four years. They were traditionally decorated with scenes which showed the sport for which they were the prize – and Miriam has taken direct inspiration from a surviving example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has also imagined how a horse race might be depicted.

'My mum is an artist,' says Miriam, 'and I have felt throughout my studies that there should be more space to explore the process of how these vases were made.'