Beyond Wild Clay

Beyond "Wild Clay"

One of the questions that has become the starting point for my current research isn't about making at all, it's about language.

As potters, we often use the term "wild clay" to describe clay gathered directly from the landscape rather than bought from a supplier. It's a phrase I've used myself for years. But the more I work with locally sourced materials, the more I find myself questioning it.

What exactly makes this clay wild?

The clay hasn't changed. It has been forming beneath our feet for millions of years. It doesn't become wild because I dig it from a cliff rather than buy it in a bag. The material is the same, it is our relationship with it that has changed.

Perhaps it is not the clay that is wild, but our distance from it.

For most of human history, people understood where their materials came from. Clay was gathered locally, processed by hand and transformed into objects used every day. Today, many of us experience clay only after it has been refined, blended, packaged and labelled. We've become disconnected from its geological origins.

The word wild unintentionally reinforces that separation. It suggests that clay gathered directly from the landscape is unusual or exotic, when in reality it was once the ordinary way of making ceramics.

This has become the first thread in a much larger body of research I'm calling Making With Place.

Through gathering local clay, making ash glazes, wood firing and exploring the geology and archaeology of the Yorkshire coast, I'm interested in how ceramics can reconnect us with the places we inhabit. Rather than making work about the landscape, I want to make work with it.

Every pot begins as geology. Every firing records a place. Every material carries a story long before it reaches the wheel.

So perhaps the question isn't What is wild clay?

Perhaps the better question is:

How did we come to think of local clay as wild in the first place?