To the casual passer-by, a fragment of pottery be it of a once richly-decorated dinner plate or a chunky fragment of a one-time flowerpot, does not get a second-glance or thought. It was only due to my involvement in creating ceramic forms, that I even stopped to pull a small shard of fired terracotta from the earth, at the site of a former horticultural nursery on the outskirts of the City of Bath.
During the walk back from this site, my left hand was busily interrogating this fragments temperature, moisture content, form, shape and texture. As opposed to a mere fragment of man-made waste, this shard was quickly becoming a fascinating source of information. It’s distinctive shape was suggesting that it once formed the circular base of a medium-sized flowerpot. A series of concentric rings impressed into its surface allowed me to retrace the hand of the potter who would have been leaning across a body of raw clay, carefully manipulating it into its final form on the rotating potter’s wheel, before being wired-off and placed to one side before picking up another ball of terracotta clay to repeat this process again and again.
Subsequent visits to this site as part of an MA degree research project whilst at Bath Spa University, resulted in the collection and tactile and visual analysis of more terracotta shards, large and small, each with its own distinguishing shape, texture and colour. It was only when I had amassed a reasonable quantity of these shards and laid them out in front of me, that I discovered the wide range of earthy shades that all fall under the descriptive banner of terracotta, from a light yellow ochre, through shades of burnt orange to deep red and crimson shades.
During this time, I was beginning to turn to ‘wild clays’, both found and donated as my primary raw material for making ceramic works. During the necessary test-firing of each collected batch of these wild clays at different temperatures, I was beginning to recreate the varieties of earthy tones of fired clay that I had been collecting from my research site. To date, no two batches of wild clay from different locations have shown identical characteristics in terms of colour or texture, whilst some have revealed wildly different characteristics when fired to the same temperature in the kiln. Whilst one sample from Bath turned a deep crimson with a very subtle surface sheen, another from the Stroud Valleys 30 miles to the north, took on a strong yellow ochre colour with a subtle but clearly visible speckled texture.
Research carried out at the time, led me to the work of Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck, who collectively make up the Dutch design company Atelier NL. The focus of Atelier NL is the study of local raw materials to see how they can inform us about place by transforming found raw materials into tangible everyday objects.
Their ‘Polderwall’ project is result of Nadine and Lonny taking numerous samples of earth from farms across the Noordoostpolder region of the Netherlands and then processing each sample into a useable clay before firing them into ceramic tiles. The result was a large wall map of the region made up of each ceramic tile reflecting the huge diversity of the soils collected from across the region.
After discovering the work of Atelier NL, I quickly realised the value of the individualities (even if subtle) of each sample of wild clay I was slowly acquiring. To have collected up all of my raw clay and thrown it all together prior to processing and using it, would have returned the resulting clay mix to the same level of locational anonymity that is present in a bag of commercially available clay. I am now seeking ways to design and create ceramic works using these clays that can speak of their source location as well as their tactile and visual uniqueness.
To find out more about Atelier NL and their Polderwall project, follow this link.