Volcanic clays from Pantelleria

Last summer I foraged a few samples of wild clay in Pantelleria. I spent my days there studying the local geology and wondering alone around the island, which was almost empty, listening to the tireless wind and feeling under my feet the rough textures of volcanic land. In Pantelleria you are on an island but you rarely look at the sea, it’s the earth that draws you in.

Searching for wild clay and rocks also means noticing details and subtleties that I have always been too distracted to see, rewriting and adding notions to old mental maps of these places.

I started reading geological maps and archeological researches on Roman clay vessels made and fired on the island. "Wild" clay and volcanic sand had been used locally from before Roman times to make a particularly thermoresistant type of ware, which was exported around the whole Mediterranean area (Baldassarri, La produzione della ceramica a Pantelleria e la sua circolazione in età tardo antica, 2012). 

The clay deposits of Pantelleria are peculiar as they are not of sedimentary, marine or lake origin, which makes the most part of clay deposits around the world, but they formed through the disintegration of volcanic rocks due to secondary volcanic activities, such as fumaroles. I collected five different types of clay and clayish soils, by hand and in small quantities, which I then processed in different ways to study the resulting textures, colours and firing properties. The smell of these clays was very pleasant, persistent and strongly mineral.

I shaped all of these clays at the wheel. Making at the wheel, with the spinning force in-between my hands and the clay truly helps me connect to the material, listen to its requests and adapt my movements.

The shape is always round, inspired by those forms that transcend geography and history. This is partly to celebrate ceramics as a technical discipline and its historical craft background before it became a popular art medium and partly because the sphere formed at the wheel showcases both the qualities of the material and the gestures that made it into an object.

The result is a small collection of round vessels all made with pure wild clays from a few different locations in Pantelleria, turned at the wheel and fired to stoneware temperatures. Each is made only of the specific place it was collected from. The colour, texture and form are an immediate reminder of the geological and creative processes that made both the volcanic clays and the vessels.