Clay
Knee deep in the churning Dart, and gently teasing handfuls of plastic pale blue matter from the ground. It is the sort of blue that is shocking in its softness, its gentleness. Clay.
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I’d probably say that I’ve been in love with clay in some form or other for as long as I can remember, though to be honest, it is so strongly intertwined with my passion for making, for hands-on conversations with natural, wild materials of all sorts, that I’d be very hard pushed to separate the two.
Making for me has always been the thing, and also a freedom from other things, most often the things I was actually supposed to be doing. One of the things I’m most proud of from roughly thirteen and a half years of being at school, is a photo of me in Year One, holding a doll and a small boat that I made from sky blue gingham fabric, masking tape and little bits of wood, that I remember making on my lap under the table when I was supposed to be creating a flat seaside scene on a piece of washed out sugar paper. The doll is nestled into the bough of my arm, the boat in my other hand, my eyes moving off camera, in a look I’d like to call gently defiant. Making felt like freedom, felt like an experiment, a way of letting my brain furl out into my fingertips.
It felt wild.
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Shot with flashes of ochre, this matter is this place.
Have you ever done that- felt a place?
I mean actually felt the weight of it in your palm, felt it relax into your fingerprints?
Beginning as Granite, big boulders of the stuff weathered over millions of years, clay forms when stacks of these little platelets amass where they were made, or are carried on water, gathering along riverbanks, and in rich underground seams. Migrating upwards, outwards, the minerals in the clay meet oxygen and change again, the initial delicate blues becoming bold, brassy ochre.
Clay acts as a record, a ledger. This seam, by the Dart, endlessly plastic, is each and every mineral that has coursed through this bend in the river since, well, forever. It is each and every burling storm on Dartmoor, long gone sheep in a stream, and farmers’ field run off upstream. Each moment stacked like a platelet. Flexible.
Majestic, and arrestingly beautiful, to peer into a seam of wild clay is to look into the very kernel of things.
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Thinking hands*, ten times more nerve endings ripple through our fingers, forearms and biceps up to our brains than move in the other direction- and that’s not even the half of it.
Making, forming, moulding, interacting with clay, we actually become more able to think flexibly, the plastic of our brain responding to the malleable matter, we make and shape ourselves and each other as much as the clay. Through working with this wild material we can begin to nurture our ability to think in 3D- to see around problems, to imagine alternative futures in our minds eye. The undeniable physicality of clay enabling us individually and also collectively as a community to think together, to connect, to build multiple solutions, possibilities, dreams, on the table, or floor in front of us. Clay is a wildly inclusive material, in that any human being, of any age, socio-economic background, ability or understanding can touch, interact, communicate and make with it.
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Making became thoroughly communal for me at The Pottery, away from any ideas of hardship, apprenticeship, of any fixed concept of a path, a route to follow. I’d say I was gently folded into the place, unsuspecting of how the material, the community, my fellow potters would change the way that I looked at clay, making, and most important things in life. If you crossed the threshold, you were a potter, it was as simple and profound as that.
The majority of the potters had disabilities that affected the way that they learned things, remembered things, made things, and moved around the space. Each an individual, amongst the potters there were those that loved making vast coil pots, building small houses for candles, illustrating huge circular plates, modelling tiny families of creatures, making replicas of human anatomy and forming flocks of birds. Others enjoyed gently scrubbing sharp edges off of pots to prepare them for firing, carefully loading the kiln, mixing and sieving glazes, and finishing pots. There was also a lot of tea to be made, drunk, and washed up. On the best kind of days, all of the above was happening simultaneously, an intricate overlapping choreography.
In making together, we conjured up wild possibilities, and some flipping brilliant pots.
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There at the beginning, for so many indigenous cultures across the world, was clay. Ancient creation stories tell of people being formed or growing from clay, and, to be honest, we probably did.
Clay is pretty amazing in that its tiny stacks of platelets can support bacterial life really, really well. Many potters will actually encourage this bacterial growth, mixing in wild clays, leaving clay outside over winter, and swearing that the clay matures over time, becoming softer, stronger, easier to make with- full of life, like a forest floor.
That bacteria could have been us. The precise conditions that clay maintains could have supported the first cells that became humans. Clay is familiar, give someone a small ball and often the first instinct is to slowly push a thumb into it, or to roll it between palms. A sort of handshake, a welcoming gesture, the start of something.
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Making something with clay when you are in a stormy mood is like trying to have a conversation with your oldest friend when the internal storm clouds are circling - it all comes out eventually. And, well, a lot of the time you tend to walk away remarkably more cheerful, more connected.
It’s actually really hard not to feel connected when you touch clay- it has experienced millions of years of weathering, and many more amassing minerals below ground, before being soaked and sieved and trod and wedged before it gets to your hands. It’s been places.
And is also a place- all clay came from one place or another, and blimey can it have a mind of its own. Like you wouldn’t believe. Disobedient matter, clay will shift and warp and crack and, on occasion, fully explode in a kiln. Making with clay is a real lesson in complexity, in humility, in accepting that wild things will always be wild, no matter how many pug mills or kiln firings you put them through. In pinching a pot, I talk, reason, persuade and argue with my fingertips, and heck, does the clay hold its own in return.
Like I said, it’s been places.
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Cycling around, moving between forms of matter, clay encourages us to stay between too. Betwixt a raw handful of sweet blue clay, and a finished pot, full of tea.
Before a clay pot is heated to 573°C, it can be recycled back into workable clay again and again, indefinitely. After this point, it will still eventually become clay again, but you’ll have to wait a few million years.
If you can gather a little clay from your local area you can make pots and then recycle them back into clay to make other pots. Unfired clay loves water, and so will soak up any liquids with gusto, so definitely not pots for tea or plants, but you could make anything purely decorative- make art!- that you like, and keep turning it back into clay if you want. Stay in between, with the trouble. It’s where the most amazing ideas, and pots happen.
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A beautiful pot is most definitely not beautiful because of me alone, or even mostly due to anything I have done. A pot that sings is a granite boulder up on Dartmoor, is the burl of the weather over millennia, is the Dart and everything that flows along it, is a kernel of a clay seam, is bodies soaking and wedging and tending the clay, is the water I slowly add, is all of the hands that have encouraged my hands to make, is a whole load of nettle soup powering the way they move, is the sunlight streaming through the window slowly drying the pots, the air moving around the room to ensure they are ready for the kiln- it is so, so many beautiful things.
In the right light, you can see them glinting at you, flashing across the round belly of a pot.
And all of this, every platelet, every molecule, every bacterium, makes me profoundly hopeful and deeply, truly cheerful.
~
Kate Bowman
cloth - @hepcloth
@print - @presspresspress_
*Please see the utterly fantastic work of Julia Rowntree and Duncan Hooson of Clayground Collective, their Thinking Hands Report is a gorgeous read.