Clay and the art of experimentation
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-04-21

My research focuses on clay and visual artists working with this material that is always on the move. Clay is better understood not as a single, homogenous substance but as a dynamic inter-relation of earth(s), water and air, changing again in relation to fire. This paper draws on my fieldwork with three artists. In labouring alongside them, I gradually got to know the rhythm and feel of their practice of making with clay, the tools, equipment and techniques they used as well as the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of this material experimentation. This focus on the relational dimensions of sculptural practice necessarily extended to the social and economic dimensions of production and exchange through which my collaborators sustain their practice (and livelihood) as artists. Rather than approach art through the lens of ‘already-thrown’ works through which social meaning, function and organisation can be read, this research works with materials, art and artists in-the-making, as relational achievements between many different logics of production, exchange and relation.
The paper engages with this panel’s turn to substances in two parts. The first engages with the work of the artist Alexandra Engelfriet, in which I discuss the role of imagination in learning to work with the exigencies of particular materials. My interest here is with the remarkable plasticity of clay and how it foregrounds not only the doing of skilful practice with this material but also its undergoing. This dimension of undergoing is interesting to the extent it unsettles the anthropocentrism implicit theories of human agency and the way they frame materials in terms of ‘affordances’. The second part follows the artist Douglas White during a residency at the European Keramich Workcentre in the Netherlands, exploring the difference the fire of the kiln makes to working with clay; in particular, the work of rendering productive (and reliable) then indeterminacy of clay’s transformation into ceramic. While the first part develops existing phenomenological approaches to making, the second tries to develop a metabolic sense of material experimentation and creativity that touches on the limits to these approaches.

Marc Higgin, University of Aberdeen