Pottery with my grandmother’s soil
The craft most intimately tied to soil is pottery. Soil, as a material, has meanings embedded in itself: roots, ancestry, grounding. The soil used for pottery is clay, a substance shaped by geological time and human touch. Pottery is a transformation of this clay, where earth, water, fire, and air meet, involving different kinds of labour in the process.
In the summer of 2021, just before I left my home village for London, I made a set of pottery ware using clay collected from my grandmother’s fields—land worked by generations of my family, and where my grandmother still labors today. The red clay carried her sweat, the fertilizer she spread, and the water she poured into the soil. It also held the sweat, fertilizer, and water of my ancestors. While kneading it, I sometimes pulled out a fat earthworm or cleared the roots of vegetables and wild grasses. Touching this soil felt like touching a long, breathing archive, one kept by plants, insects, animals, and the ancient weather of the village: its wind, its rain, its fog, its dawn dew.
I took the clay pieces to a local brick factory and fired them in the kiln with the help of a worker. To thank him, I offered packs of cigarettes that had accumulated in my grandmother’s house—gifts villagers pressed into our hands during weddings and funerals. Those gatherings were relatively frequent; the village was mostly elderly, and the young liked to return home to celebrate marriage. My grandmother and I never smoked, so the cigarette packs piled up.
Shaping tableware from wild clay became a collaboration: between me and my grandmother, my ancestors, the brick worker, the village’s intervals of celebration and mourning, and the non-human presences within the soil. It was an exchange of labour and gifts, an interweaving of bodies, histories, and materials into forms that could sit on a table and be held in our hands.
In the summer of 2021, just before I left my home village for London, I made a set of pottery ware using clay collected from my grandmother’s fields—land worked by generations of my family, and where my grandmother still labors today. The red clay carried her sweat, the fertilizer she spread, and the water she poured into the soil. It also held the sweat, fertilizer, and water of my ancestors. While kneading it, I sometimes pulled out a fat earthworm or cleared the roots of vegetables and wild grasses. Touching this soil felt like touching a long, breathing archive, one kept by plants, insects, animals, and the ancient weather of the village: its wind, its rain, its fog, its dawn dew.
I took the clay pieces to a local brick factory and fired them in the kiln with the help of a worker. To thank him, I offered packs of cigarettes that had accumulated in my grandmother’s house—gifts villagers pressed into our hands during weddings and funerals. Those gatherings were relatively frequent; the village was mostly elderly, and the young liked to return home to celebrate marriage. My grandmother and I never smoked, so the cigarette packs piled up.
Shaping tableware from wild clay became a collaboration: between me and my grandmother, my ancestors, the brick worker, the village’s intervals of celebration and mourning, and the non-human presences within the soil. It was an exchange of labour and gifts, an interweaving of bodies, histories, and materials into forms that could sit on a table and be held in our hands.
Grandmother laboring on the land
Wedding Feast, pencil on paper, 21cm*15cm, 2021