Why do we call some clay “wild”?

When we use the term “wild clay” we are referring to clays that are dug directly from the ground, with our own labour, usually foraged in small batches of which we know the exact geographical and sometimes geological origin. The act of foraging said clay becomes an integral part in the ceramics process. “Wild” clays can be heavily, lowly or not processed at all, but usually allow for great diversity between batches, unreplicable or somehow even unpredictable results.

”Wild” does not refer to the division between nature and culture, nature and technology, wilderness and domestication, the good and the bad, Mother Earth and AI, the pretty forest and the polluted mine. Wild is also not used as a reminiscence of a colonial past of conquering and discovering. Wild does also not refer to less contemporary, more messy, holistic, spiritual, ancestral or authentic ways of making ceramics.

“Wild” clay is specifically contrapposed to commercially available clay, and no, not all clay is “wild”.
Obviously all clay comes from the earth somewhere, but the majority of commercially available clays are made according to recipes with pure and refined materials that, in most cases, have partially or completely lost traceability, meaning that we don’t know where the initial materials were mined, by whom, at what risks and in which conditions, for whom profit. Commercially available clays make at the end something very different from the soil we walk upon, usually they are also much “better”, or at least they perform better in certain aspects, because they were combined to fulfill a specific objective.

Wild clay is in all respects a piece of land, carrying a specific geological and sentimental DNA.
It’s not representative, made to mimic nature and the landscape, but it really is that hill or riverbed or that memory you have associated with it and that makes that place unlike any other place: a distinctive hill full of flowers, or a distinctive parking lot next to that hill, or a distinctive dump with a belligerent smell.

Historically, while there has been strong commonality between ceramic practices across time and space, the local and specific variety of materials is also how ceramic traditions have specialized along different lines across the world, with some places focusing on colourful decorations on low fire earthenware, others on naked smoked vessels or ash glazes effects in high fire wood kilns.
Each tradition has responded, among other things, to the geology surrounding the area, demonstrating how much of ceramics is a form of co-creation with the land.

It’s really this connection with a place that makes wild clay a different practice compared to other ways of making ceramics. I think that although the practice of wild clay delineates by definition an attention to place and a slower, more laborious and therefore hopefully aware approach towards the material, it isn’t by definition a more valuable practice. Not better, not more ethical, not more sustainable, not greener, not more political, just different, despite some quite successful greenwashing attempts lately. Or do we all have to agree that receiving a bag of clay by post is exactly identical in every aspect to digging that clay in our surroundings?

Wild clay is also obviously not a recent invention. Only the term to define it is new. Most small scale ceramists have always produced within logic of locality, mixing clays and tempers that were locally available. Same goes for waste, “recycled” clay and recycled materials within ceramics: small scale ceramic artisans have always implemented circularity within their practice and most ceramic materials that reach our small scale studios are already by-products of larger industries.

Historically ceramists were not as bourgeois as today (most of us would have definitely not survived the conditions of being artisans in the past), therefore ceramics has always been a circular and more or less local practice, as waste and import/export of packaged dirt was a luxury.

Wild” might be a very imperfect term but its discourse has a regenerative strenght. The story is about the modality of reproduction of the material and how this material is with us, it’s a story of noticing, co-habiting and a mode of attention. It’s a search of knowledge and a form of intimacy, with the inevitable chaos that comes from every relation. Very simply, it’s an inquiry on where things come from, and the answer is all around us.

Foraging wild clay in Milano.