Making with Soil
In the summer of 2021, while studying art remotely at Slade from my hometown in the hilly region of Sichuan, I wrote an essay about soil. In the essay, I wrote:
“The craft that is directly related to soil is pottery. Soil as a material has meanings embedded in itself: roots, ancestry, grounding. The soil for pottery is clay. Pottery is a transformation of clay, a product of the interaction of the elements of earth, water, fire, and air, with different kinds of labor involved in the process.”
That summer, before I left my hometown for London, I made pottery tableware using the primitive coiling method with clay I collected from the village fields, which generations of my ancestors had worked on, and where my grandmother still labors today. I fired the tableware in the kiln of a local brick factory, with assistance from a factory worker. To express my gratitude to him, I gave him packs of cigarettes that villagers had gifted us when we attended their wedding or funeral feasts. I was living with my grandmother in the village, and we often participated in these feasts, as there were mainly elderly people in the villages, leading to frequent funerals. Additionally, many young couples prefer to have weddings in their hometowns. Since neither my grandmother nor I smoke, we accumulated quite a number of cigarette packs over time.
Making pottery tableware from wild clay collected from the village fields represents a collaboration among me, my grandmother, my ancestors, the brick factory worker, and the village, involving an exchange of labor, materials, and gifts.
“The craft that is directly related to soil is pottery. Soil as a material has meanings embedded in itself: roots, ancestry, grounding. The soil for pottery is clay. Pottery is a transformation of clay, a product of the interaction of the elements of earth, water, fire, and air, with different kinds of labor involved in the process.”
That summer, before I left my hometown for London, I made pottery tableware using the primitive coiling method with clay I collected from the village fields, which generations of my ancestors had worked on, and where my grandmother still labors today. I fired the tableware in the kiln of a local brick factory, with assistance from a factory worker. To express my gratitude to him, I gave him packs of cigarettes that villagers had gifted us when we attended their wedding or funeral feasts. I was living with my grandmother in the village, and we often participated in these feasts, as there were mainly elderly people in the villages, leading to frequent funerals. Additionally, many young couples prefer to have weddings in their hometowns. Since neither my grandmother nor I smoke, we accumulated quite a number of cigarette packs over time.
Making pottery tableware from wild clay collected from the village fields represents a collaboration among me, my grandmother, my ancestors, the brick factory worker, and the village, involving an exchange of labor, materials, and gifts.
