Wild clay and politics: on foraging amidst capitalism, occupation and climate change
“Originally, the word "wilderness" was a compound of wild and deer;
it was any place where wild animals roamed free.
But wild-deer-ness was always more than just a place;
it was a state of mind.
Frances Zaunmiller, the mountain woman who spent forty-five years
living along Salmon River in the Idaho outback, defined wilderness as
the psychological expanse where someone can walk without trespassing.”
Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us
Working with wild clay, taking the time to find it, process it and understand it is a strong way to feel and be connected with the environment around us, on both a physical and political level. Despite previously reasoning on land, I have spent the majority of my life without giving much thought about the complexity of the soil we walk upon. The moment in which I was finally able to really see soil was when I became a ceramist.
Soil has a curious ambivalence: omnipresent and abundant yet presented as invisible, mineral and organic, made of living and non-living things, surface and belowground, political and poetic zone, universal yet very specific to each place, end, start and every moment in between life. There is so much to see when you start to look at soils and rocks: colour, texture, critters, remnants of death, seeds of the new, marks of what has happened and how human life can transform it. Soil carries the reproduction of biological life, but is also a text on our political, cultural and spiritual life, conveying the specific conditions of the contexts it went through. I sometimes wonder if I am allowed to speak with and for the land within my work.
It might seem an act of little importance to forage clay from our surroundings, but I think it’s one of those gestures that help us contemplate what it is to be human. Wild clay has a clear agential power over us, anyone who has worked with it knows it. It makes us understand more about the specificity of a particular place and our relationship with it. It’s not just about the use we make of it, but the meaning it has on its own and together with us. It makes us realise how we are fully with the land and it talks with us through all of our senses. When I had covid I lost the sense of smell and I finally noticed how much information and dialogue there is within smelling soil.
Foraging clay, if not done thoughtfully, can be problematic in a world where many communities have been expropriated of and expelled from their own land and where we don’t all have the same access to it. There’s no conflict, no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no colonisation that didn’t also involve stealing resources and land grabbing. Foraging can be a loaded topic in a context in which land is still conceived as an object in an extractivist sense, and when there’s financial profit involved with making things out of pieces of land we collect, even our small living independent wages as ceramicists, foragers, pigment gatherers, farmers. We cannot ignore the set of social relations and relations of power that shape the treatment of land: the cultivation of soil has been central to defining capitalist private property, establishing political jurisdiction, the artificially constructed nation state and to extending these models of territorial dominance through colonialism and empire. Any discourse on materiality cannot be thought of in a void: understanding clay through a geological sense, with its grammar of classification and expropriation, is not by definition an innocent or “natural” frame, immune from violence. Within geology there are implicit modes of description and appropriation doubling of the notion of property: “property as a description of mineralogy and property as an acquisition (as resource, land, extractive quality of energy or mineral)” (Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None).
This is not to say that foraging clay is wrong, on the very contrary foraging clay can be an act of protest and preservation in a world where every inch of land is commodified, privatised, walled up, capitalised and accumulated. Jason Hickel writes: “The moral code at play here is not that you should never take (that would lead to a quick demise), but that you should never take more than the other is willing or able to give – in other words, never more than an ecosystem can regenerate. And you have to make sure to give back in return, by doing what you can to enrich, rather than degrade, the ecosystems on which you depend. This takes a lot of work. It requires listening, empathy, dialogue” (Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World). Foraging can be an act of care, a form of intimate and social knowledge. It is a form of seeing, as you may notice that, with time, clay, soil, and what lives on it start to be increasingly recognisable and familiar. There’s a beautiful passage by Jenny Odell that describes this change in patterns of attention: “... while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible. Redwoods, oaks, and blackberry shrubs will never again be ‘a bunch of green.’ A towhee will never simply be ‘a bird’ to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.” (Jenny Odell, How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy). Foraging clay can also be a way of developing a tangible understanding of the world and community-sustaining skills.
When I forage clay, I try to do my best at following a few steps, or questions, which are in constant evolution and by no means an exhaustive or rigid list to follow, acknowledging that I’ve got it wrong multiple times in the past and probably will again:
How do you feel in relation to this clay and place? A local? Someone that has a meaningful connection to it? Do you have history with it? How did you find the place? Do you care for it? Could you give it a name? Does everyone have the same access to it as you do? What steps have you taken to get to know it? Will you come back? Do you have anything to say to them? Or are you just a passing tourist? There’s no rigidity in how we answer these questions, and the concept of localism can be nuanced, vast and open to all, but having some form of knowledge, relation, care and awareness with the place we are foraging from makes for a truer experience all around.
Connect with others who know the land. Try and find out as much information as you can on that specific clay. Has it been used by others in the past or present? Has anything been written on it? How is it different/familiar to other materials you know?
Never collect more clay than you need.
Be gentle. The land seems strong like a rock, but is actually very fragile. You know well that rocks can be very soft. Focus on areas where clays have already been naturally eroded or fallen, don’t dig in and take clay from eroding cliffs.
Never forage in religious or spiritual sites, archeological sites, natural parks, cultural heritage areas without permission from the rightful owners.
Forage thinking of community and other people. If it feels like stealing something that shouldn't be yours, you shouldn't take it.
It’s really not enough to write up a performative statement on a website in which you acknowledge past genocides and that you are working on stolen land. Genocides and stealing of land are still happening today. We have no right to work with wild clay unless we also fight for that land to be free from occupation, accessible to everyone, returned to the rightful owners, and from the river to the sea.
Forage thinking of the diverse political, cultural and spiritual meanings different peoples give to soil.
Remember that clay is alive and supports a complex ecosystem of beings: forage recognizing that specific places and soils are important to everything that grows and lives on it, human and nonhuman critters enveloped by and within it, dependent and connected to it.
Leave the environment as you found it.
Don’t approach wild clay as a novelty, or as a sustainable invention that will allow enlightened green designers to save the world. Foraging clay is not an invention, wild clay is not a new material and ceramic is hardly sustainable in the very simplistic definition of green sustainability that is usually fed to us.
Share the knowledge or the act of foraging together with others, but don’t share specific locations publicly, and on instagram. Looking for a certain material can sometimes be a very simple gesture or a very complex endeavour, it should be accessible and shared within contexts that enable care, community and a slow approach. Share, offline or online, taking time and attention with it, not as a currency, a quick geotag for passing and passive tourists.
Give credit when you “take” something from others.Lastly, there’s also the law. The laws that apply for rock collecting also apply to clay. If it’s private property (and the owner is not a multinational company that mines tons of materials for shareholder’s profit) you should ask permission. If it’s public property you should follow the rock collecting advice specific to your country (in certain places, like Italy, laws on collecting rocks varies from region to region. For example in Piemonte and Valle d’Aosta you need a permit yet if you register as a mining company you don’t have to have or follow mining plans and you might save on taxes). Best to leave property or trespassing rights to your own discretion.
I like to think that when we work with wild clay, we are not creating something, but rather creating a view of something.
We have a responsibility, as ceramists and foragers, to take care of the land and everything that depends on it, to realise its political meaning and stand where it’s needed: not just protecting the land and the soil in themselves, but also protecting communities from ravaging capitalism, commodification and state violence. May we forage and live with soil in ways that disrupt all the shit that is around us.
Readings to think of soil, land and clay:
Kauae Raro research collective, Tikanga: gathering and processing guidelines. https://www.kauaeraro.com/tikanga
Nick Hayes, The book of trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us, Bloomsbury 2020
The art show, What are the ethics of digging up your own clay? Larissa Warren and Violet Bond speak to Rosa Ellen alongside Indigenous archaeologist Dave Johnston and Journal of Australian Ceramics editor Vicki Grima.
Available at https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-art-show/karla-dickens-wild-clay-summer-/14100714
Anja Slapnicar Wild clay writings, available at https://anjaslapnicar.com/writings/
Juan Francisco Salazar, Céline Granjou, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, Manuel Tironi, Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory, Bloomsbury 2020
R. L. Martens and B. Robertson, How the Soil Remembers Plantation Slavery https://edgeeffects.net/soil-memory-plantationocene/
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, 2014
Property Will Cost Us the Earth, Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3003-property-will-cost-us-the-earth
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
Abdallah Aljazzar, Engineering a kitchen in Gaza, January 9, 2024. Available at https://wearenotnumbers.org/engineering-a-kitchen-in-gaza/
Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the world: feminism and the politics of the commons, 2019
Jason Hickel, Less is more, 2020
