Archeology of Passions
Archeology of Passions marks a transition in my practice to thinking-through-making and connecting self-making with community-making through material studies of recycled clay. I source clay from the sink buckets where undergraduate and graduate students rinse their tools and dump the residual material. Otherwise kept separate, residue from this community’s research converges in the waste. Focusing on this waste the resulting clay body contains mostly clay, some glaze and a fraction of unknown substances. Beginning as a study of material, Archeology of Passions revealed community with material.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold describes the act of making as tying the flows of consciousness with flows of materials. Flows of materials are the lives of a material before and after entering the maker’s hands. Flows of consciousness are the lives of makers' thought before and after making. As the material of Archeology of Passions, the clay embodies the immediate history of research waste while holding the longer formative history of exchanges of minerals, water, and other substances.
To Ingold, these flows are parallel to each other until they are tied through making. The maker’s preconceived idea or image from their flow of consciousness intertwines with the object forming in the flow of materials. Taking the clay from the waste buckets I join the flow of materials to form the clay body with two guiding questions. How will the body behave at varying mixed states and different firing temperatures? One batch is left unmixed, another is wedged or kneaded by hand, the last is homogenized or completely mixed.
As the maker begins to shape material, the material responds with its own physical nature to support or complicate the intention. As the maker senses and responds, they learn from the material while also shaping it. Together in this dialogue material and maker form and challenge presupposed ideas revealing new iterations. Whether questioning preconceptions or affirming intentions, to Ingold, makers correspond with materials to form ideas. While forming the studies of this clay body I was reflecting on waste, community and thought. The clay body responds to my actions resisting and affirming through qualities embodied in the material. Observing the resulting shapes and forms from these studies, I practice listening to the material as it contributes to making meaning.
The unmixed batch clearly reveals different elements in the clay (glazes, clays, paper, metal, unknown substances, etc.) reacting to each other through diverse arrangements of color, texture and cracking. This body is fragile in places with some surfaces fusing and others separating, flaking and cracking. The texture, reminiscent of a diverse ecosystem, speaks with the colorful arrangements of differing qualities within the material. The diversity with its resistances and bonds forms points of fragility and strength providing metaphors for meaning making. As communities arrange themselves, diverse perspectives provide engaging textures through bonds and fractures.
The batch wedged by hand produces a slightly more predictable and malleable outcome. There is some marbling of color with emerging pockets of glaze. It is less textured and if wedged too far loses variation in color. With more of the maker’s hand in mixing, the clay body becomes more unified. Through touch I sense the characteristic of the clay body such as plasticity, humidity and consistency. There is more structural unity while still maintaining variation. When ripped in half to inspect the wedge pattern, an internal spiral depicts the merging of qualities. Compression, depression and spiraling together in response to the maker’s hand provides textural opportunity while unifying structure.
The homogenized body has a unified color and texture, is most predictable and easiest to form with. This body is receptive to manipulation and most predictable with a unified structure. The diverse conversations that were once visible combine to inform and integral body manifesting in subtle inconsistencies.
Observing the color, texture and behavior the maker can connect with the clay body’s flow of materials. As a maker, I am contributing to the material flow of this clay as we think through ideas. Participating in the flow of materials, I realize that the clay body’s unique qualities connect me to the flows of consciousness of others who have contributed to this material. In this way, self-making connects to community-making by exposing an arrangement of community in material.
Material studies are here redefined as mutual unfolding of life between material and human makers. The maker begins a relationship in dialogue with materials. Making material studies I become familiar with the clay body and also amplify metaphors that inform ideas. Materials become collaborators in the mutual unfolding of flows. If material is understood as an autonomous collaborator in the realization of thought, then our community is amplified. This offers an alternative to the role of material as resource to unilaterally control. Through participation in mutual growth we, humans, involve ourselves in worldly processes that are already going on and continue after us. In this way we give in to the flows of the world listening actively while engaging relationally.