ABSTRACT
Here is Where We Moved the Mountain: Mining the Northern Anthropocene is a thesis project completed to fulfill the requirements of an MFA degree in visual arts. The project focused on locally-collected clays and minerals, both natural and manmade, to explore the possibility of place-based ceramics in the anthropocene, the proposed name for the current geologic epoch in which humans are the main driver of planetary change. Material availability specific to this epoch include fly-ash and coal slag from the power plant; minerals extracted by the municipal water utility; and glass, metal and ceramic waste and byproducts. The resulting sculptural work was presented to the public as an installation in the University of Alaska Fairbanks Fine Arts Gallery in March, 2015. This project report summarizes the research and inquiries involved in the development of the project.
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HERE IS WHERE WE MOVED THE MOUNTAIN Mining the Northern Anthropocene
HERE IS WHERE WE MOVED THE MOUNTAIN. The words rang aloud as if someone had spoken them in my ear, but I was completely alone on the banks of the roaring drainage where meltwater pours out from under the Castner Glacier. I had been there for hours, watching the thick pearlescence of the silt-heavy waters tumble and bloom in little eddies between the rocks while the sky blackened and damp polka dots appeared on the sand and rocks around me until they crowded each other out and everything was dark and gleaming. The sun cracked through again and the screen of moisture that had settled in the valley dissolved back into the place from where it came from like a banished phantom. I watched a tiny speck of mica lapping at the riverbank, undecided in its alliance. Now with the river, now with the bank, again with the river… and when it finally settled with the bank I knew it was only for an extended pause that would outlast my impatient and small human moment. Then the next drops of rain would fall and the sand would shift once more and this speck would flow on, as I already have from that place and as will everything, eventually. Observing this border between the river and the bank, between the wet rush of the water and the damp solid sand, it occurred to me that all borders are actually gradients. The delineation between this and that exists only in our minds and even there it is a movable boundary, entirely dependent on the scale at which we observe our world.
I looked up across the little pool at my feet to the torrent of water ahead, flung high into the air by a giant boulder that interrupted its pounding course, and that, as I watched, was becoming the sand of a future riverbank. I looked beyond to the muddy glacial toe, a place where I had stood a year before as sheets of mud and rock dropped into invisible crevasses around me, terrified that any wrong step would trigger the gaping maw and devour me whole while the pink clouds of the solstice midnight drifted placid and glorious above my inconsequential earthly lapse of judgment. Above me towered the craggy peaks of the Delta mountains through which the glacier had carved its slow icy path, their former prominences now deposited at my feet where I scooped them up with my trowel into bags and buckets to carry back to the studio. HERE IS WHERE WE MOVED THE MOUNTAIN, I heard, as I hiked back towards the road, my backpack heavy and dripping with mud. Ahead, the Trans Alaska Pipeline gleamed in the late sun, pumping crude oil from deep beneath the frozen arctic to the delta of distribution at Valdez, just another kind of river, moving other ancient materials elsewhere.
MAKING AS A WAY OF KNOWING
That afternoon by the glacier I experienced one of those brief shimmering moments where the veil of normal reality is lifted, temporal and spatial scale dissolves and the resulting knowledge of an underlying unity is an experience of the divine. This knowledge cannot be parsed, only felt, and it is this transcendent understanding that I seek, and occasionally find, in the process of making art. Making is a way of knowing. By attempting to exert our influence upon the world, we learn what is responsive, what is resistant, what is on a scale so other than our own that we pass through it like ghosts. By groping around in the amorphous we begin to detect the forms, and these too gain resolution and clarity as we continue to feel them out. My understanding of the world grows and matures and gains subtlety and perspective through this sensory-emotional experience of making. As an artist, this occurs through the physical and conceptual interaction with my materials and tools, but I recognize that my own experience does not completely define the resulting artifacts. Each person who encounters them brings to the artifact their own cumulative history, their own preferences, their own knowledge. In Modern Man in Search of A Soul, Carl Jung wrote, “a great work of art is like a dream; for all of its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal” (Jung 1933). I strive to create work that provides a structure for the viewer’s experience without dictating a specific response. But I also believe that the mental and bodily knowledge accrued in the process of making become embedded in the objects we create, and that this knowledge is transferable from maker to viewer, through the object, in a way that we do not yet fully understand.
Practice-led research is an emerging framework that recognizes the generation of knowledge through practice in addition to the traditional understanding of research as information gathering in support of practice. In contrast to objective research, this framework recognizes the investigation and knowledge generation that occurs within disciplines operating, in the act of creation, at a frontier of uncertainty. What distinguishes practice-led research from other forms of practice is an “explicit understanding of how the practice contributes to the inquiry” (Rust et al 2007). In my case, a ceramics practice offers an appropriate lens through which to explore the mineral resources in our immediate environment and our complex relationships with their raw and processed forms.
I am hyper-aware of the boundary between deep inner space and deep outer space and I resonate with work that seems to capture this threshold, where scale is an ourobouro, a serpent perpetually eating its tail. I always come back to an elemental interest in fractals, the recursive, and the self-cyclical. In the presence of art that strikes a personal chord within me, I experience something different than I do as a maker but equally transcendent of normal boundaries between the internal and external universe. I came across a passage in a book on drawing by Patricia Cain that helped me begin to understand the sensory-emotional pleasure of resonating with someone else’s art. Cain underwent a rigorous process of repeatedly copying a drawing by another artist and carefully documenting her experience. Under an image from an early phase of one copy she made a note that read: “lines involving major decisions (compared to repetitive lines which extend an existing idea).” I realized that this is often a part of what we do as we experience art, a sort of forensic retracing of the decision making process through the art back to the artist and in doing so, we partially embody the experience of its creation. Whether this experience is an accurate reproduction of the artist’s original experience is irrelevant; we feel the pleasure of a dawning understanding between ourselves, our actions, and our materials. With ceramics I experience the mountain, the rock, the sand, the clay, the fire, the pot, the fragment, the sand, the subduction zone, the magma core, the rising crust, and everything begins anew. My hope is that the artifacts that result from this exploration of the northern anthropocene are able to embody and transfer some component of my experience to others, and that this exchange needs no explanation.
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TIME AND SPACE, HISTORY AND PLACE
TIME: THE ANTHROPOCENE
For over 20,000 years, ceramics were made around the world using the clays and minerals that were directly available to the people making them (Rice, 1999). Today, the global trade of mineral commodities renders the limitations of the local environment irrelevant and the modern ceramicist works with a suite of materials sourced from all over the world. These materials represent remote mining operations, factory processing of raw materials to meet industrial standards, and vast networks of transportation and distribution. These complex, energy-intensive processes are common to our relationship with most of the resources we rely on, from food to water to energy production. We are beginning to recognize where the intensity of human impact on global systems has left a permanent mark.
Anthropocene is the proposed term for a new geologic epoch, defined as a distinct period where the effects of human behaviors are the main drivers of global change (Cruetzen and Stoermer, 2000). Decreased biodiversity, global warming, and trace elements redistributed across the planet by industry and warfare will mark our presence for posterity in the geologic record. Inspired by the extremely localized and innovative use of materials in traditional ceramic technology in the far north, I began to think about what materials were uniquely available to me, not only in terms of locality but at this point in history as well. Beyond the highly engineered, globally sourced suite of materials available to the modern ceramicist, I was curious as to what I could collect, locally, that my predecessors did not have access to. I wanted to inherit the historic spirit of place-based material innovation rather than fetishize history through imitation. What materials could I scavenge that were unique to the Anthropocene?
By expanding my focus to the time as well as the place, I was drawn to locations, materials and processes I would not have otherwise encountered or considered: rocks from overburden exposed by mines; cakes of calcium and iron extracted in the filtration process at the municipal water facility; clay from deep seams exposed by cut-banks where highways were laid; scrap and glaze slop intended for disposal by local ceramics studios; glass bottles and tin cans from the transfer station. At the Usibelli coal mine in Healy, I dug clay and collected shale that had been exposed by industrial mining activity, in a spectacular canyon hewn from the hills with hydraulic jets. Today, the coal is loaded in boxcars and distributed to population centers along the rail belt or loaded onto cargo ships for the Asian market. I followed this coal trail back north to the university campus, where five full boxcars are unhitched each week at the end of a rail spur that leads into the power plant. There, it feeds the throbbing metabolic center of this whole academic enterprise. Dumped into a chute between the rails through a special hatch in the belly of each boxcar, the coal travels on belts and buckets up from the basement and into a giant bank of cast-iron furnaces that heat enormous boilers rising three stories above. The steam from the boilers blasts through huge electricity-generating turbines and then out through utilidors that snake under the campus, distributing tremendous heat and power, supporting life and activity on what would otherwise be a dark and frozen hillside much of the year. The byproduct of the coal burning process is called fly ash; a chunky matrix of refractory materials left behind after the organic material is burnt. Primarily silica, alumina, iron and calcium oxides, the fly ash is chemically similar to ceramic glazes, with trace elements specific to the coal seam where it originated. For years, the UAF power plant has been spreading the fly ash on the Taku Parking lot, although there have been attempts at finding other uses for it. In the past, researchers looked into the potential for a fly ash-based Alaskan concrete industry, and today mining engineers are developing techniques to extract trace precious metals that have been detected in the ash, such as gold and platinum. The power plant kindly provided buckets of this fly ash, for inclusion in my Anthropocene ceramic experiments.
CLINKERS
On my first visit to the power plant, I noticed colorful globs of melted and puffed materials, like amorphous rice-krispy treats, sitting on the floor throughout the facility. It turned out these were “clinkers,” large conglomerates of clays, iron and silica and other minerals melted out of the coal. They clog up the boilers, so they are removed and disposed of.
It was love at first site. These polychrome, multi-textured, sculptural byproducts of the power plant seemed like accidental spirit twins to my own work, rock-like conglomerations of natural materials exposed to unnatural conditions and processes by human hands. It turned out these manmade geologic specimens were not alone. Although clinkers do occasionally occur in nature, where lignite coal seams catch fire and melt surrounding sediments, numerous other rocks of a distinctly anthropogenic nature have been identified. I like to think of my project as an extension of this mutant mineralogy.
TRINITITE
Trinitite is the name given to the glassy conglomerates that formed at Trinity Site, New Mexico, in 1945 when the first atomic bomb was tested. It is composed of quartz and feldspar sand particles as well as other fused minerals surrounding the blast site. The name is often used to refer to analogous formations at other blast sites, even when the composition differs. This anthropogenic rock is particularly interesting in relation to the concept of the anthropocene as a human-driven geologic epoch; the nuclear tests permanently contributed radioactive isotopes to the environment that had never existed on planet earth before, forming a chemical marker of human impact on the lithosphere. Trinitite was believed to be harmless, and the mineral specimens were turned into atomic-age jewelry, although the CDC later determined that these gems could cause radiation burns when worn against the skin.
MOTOR AGATE
Before the development of electrostatic paint, cars were sprayed by hand on the production line and progressed on tracks into an oven that would harden the enamel. The overspray from this process collected on the tracks and was baked repeatedly as it rotated through the ovens, until the buildup was too thick and had to be chipped away. The resulting chunks of enamel, when cross cut, reveal striations of the colored body paint that was used at that point in time. Referred to as motor agate or fordite (after the company where it was often collected), it became prized by rockhounds for its ability to be cut and polished with traditional lapidary processes, as well as for its historical novelty.
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BOATITE
Online mineral message boards abound with the forensic geology of Fordite fans, where the origins of thumb-sized chunks are debated based on color and form, and pinpointed to specific years in specific factories. One picture I came across mystified everyone with its layers of white and neutral colors, until a particularly well-versed anthropogenic mineral nerd identified it as boatite, fordite’s maritime cousin, which could be mined in certain shipyards. The small niche of manmade rocks clearly has room for growth, and just recently a new specimen in this category was identified and hailed as a horizon marker for the dawn of the Anthropocene in the sedimentary record.
PLASTIGLOMERATE
In June 2014, a group of North American scientists published their findings on a new kind of rock, which they called plastiglomerate (Corcoran et al. 2014). A number of specimens were collected on Hawaiian beaches, consisting of melted polymers, basalt, sand, coral and other organic matter. The scientists concluded that many of these rocks were the result of fires on the beach, which had melted plastic particles and debris accumulated in the sand together with other tideline detritus. They also noted the potential for plastiglomerate formation in other high temperature scenarios, such as lava flows and forest fires.
- Plastiglomerate sample from Kamilo Beach, Hawaii. (Photo: Patricia Corcoran).
NEW ROCKS, OLD USES
Anthropogenic rocks have been embraced for traditional uses alongside the real deal in diverse applications beyond jewelry. The Nokia “brick phone,” famous for its indestructibility, even found its way into masonry walls like this one, which ultimately vaporized in meme glory on the facade of the great virtual edifice of our time, the internet.
We confront an element of horror when we are faced with the physical manifestation of our permanent impact on the planet. At the same time, I can’t help but find these anthropogenic rocks beautiful, as artifacts of nature, of which we – and all of our behaviors and actions, for better or worse – are a part. The duality of man versus nature is false from all perspectives but the human one, and everything else continues to thrive or succumb to the forces of the universe, with or without us. Grounding my practice in the mineral world is ultimately my own emotional survival tactic. Contemplating the slow, stable churning of the lithosphere is a great palliative when faced with the turbulence and fragility of life. The rock cycle operates at a scale of time and space so different from our own that we could not significantly alter it if we tried, and this I find deeply comforting.
PLACE: THE FAR NORTH
As a transplant to Alaska beginning a ceramics program, I knew immediately that I wanted to avoid making anywhere-art, and the importance of integrating the role of place into my work was paramount. As an outsider, the myth of Alaska revolves around two central topics: adventure and resource extraction. A land of fish and gold mines and oil wells populated with brave, self-reliant seekers who want to extricate themselves from the unnecessary trappings of normal society. Alaska’s siren song calls us “North To the Future,” and occupies our collective consciousness simultaneously as a final frontier for individual freedom and a final frontier for unspoiled wilderness, both a land of opportunity and a canary-in-the-coalmine for global changes, from declining fisheries to the pressures of development on wild lands, to the emerging geopolitics of an open arctic ocean.
Early in the program, I knew I wanted to explore these ideas by linking the rich history of mineral exploration in the far north to a ceramics practice. Because ceramics directly utilizes so many raw materials, it seemed there was great potential for engaging with the region through local minerals used in glazes and clay bodies. During the 2012-2013 academic year I began an in-depth exploration of this idea. I collected local minerals and clays, processed the raw material into usable forms, analyzed the samples with x-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy techniques, and used the information to develop unique ceramic materials. I also began researching the history of arctic ceramic technology, including early ethnographic accounts of traditionally utilized clay sources across the state. I began to see the project as a way to gain a holistic understanding of the movement and transformation of geologic material from its raw state in nature through to a finished ceramic object, while establishing a clear connection between my work and the specific place, both geographically and historically, in which it is made.
These early explorations resulted in the Cylinders series that married casts of discarded tin cans and rust-like glazes colored with local clays, the Quartz Clones series of slip-cast copies taken from a mold of a rock and then glazed with the pulverized original rock, and the Tiny Forms series of miniature ceramic sculptures accompanied by archivally-printed scanning electron micrographs that provided a window into the drama of their forms at a scale smaller than we can see with the human eye.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
As a project oriented towards engagement with this specific location, a significant portion of the inquiry has involved historical research on mineral-based art and artifacts in the arctic. An extensive review of ceramic technology in the arctic revealed a long history of resourceful techniques and adaptations developed by coastal and interior communities, specific to creating ceramics in their unique and challenging environments.
A review of early arctic expedition logs and journals, from Frobisher in the 1500s through Peary in 1909, investigated the depiction of arctic geology by early European explorers who saw the region as an untapped wealth of mineral resources, a view still very much en vogue to this day.
Creative experimentation with materials in the proximate environment has been the principal approach to art making for the vast majority of history. Around 1.4 million years ago, our hominid ancestors were applying their skills of material manipulation to the creation of symmetrical tear-drop shaped tools, called Acheulean hand axes. What began as crude tools evolved into something else; these artifacts, which often exhibit especially colorful choices of stone or careful positioning of fossils within the design, and none of the wear and tear expected from tool use, are considered by some to be the earliest examples of human art (Dutton 2009). Here in the far north, the people of the arctic have employed ceramic technology for over 3,500 years, using local clay and an understanding of its properties to make pottery and figurines for functional and ritual use (Anderson 2011). This practice continued and was refined until the late 1800s when industrial wares from Europe superseded local production and the knowledge of clay sources and production methods were no longer passed on. More recently, individual potters in the Alaskan interior used clay provided by the Usibelli coal mine in Healy, where a kaolinite deposit ran adjacent to the coal seam and was removed in the mining process. At one point, the mine provided this clay to local artists who found it suitable for pottery, although this has not been the case for quite some time. Within the Alaskan ceramics community, there are many stories of people collecting and processing clay from the Healy area, from Cook Inlet, and other locations, but there is no publicly available documentation of these endeavors. This project intends to pick up where others left off, following the vague anecdotes of those who sought local clays before, and developing new sources and procedures to add to the knowledge.
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PRECEDENTS AND INSPIRATIONS
To better understand my own artistic context when I began the MFA program, I began to ask around about historic ceramics in the far north and was surprised when I was told, repeatedly, that there was not much of a ceramics tradition. I began to search for evidence of one, compiling photos of pottery sherds from archaeological collections and anecdotes of pottery making from historic accounts and early ethnographic interviews. I soon realized there had been a widespread and long-lasting tradition of ceramics in Alaska. Ceramic technology was introduced thousands of years ago with cultural migrations across the Bering Straight and continued in many communities until the introduction of metal wares after European contact. The contemporary lack of awareness of this tradition is a result of the nature of the wares. Due to social and environmental conditions (short and wet pottery-making seasons, limited timber, seasonally nomadic communities, etc.), arctic pottery was only fired to very low temperatures, causing it to disintegrate quickly and thus rarely appear in archaeological assemblages. In fact, the wares were fired to such a low temperature that they were still permeable to water, and most arctic pottery techniques involved the inclusion of blood or fats in the clay body, or as a finish sealant, to make them useful for cooking and storage.
This research confirmed my suspicion that I need not look further than my immediate surroundings for plentiful ceramic materials and inspiration, as humans have done for millennia.
I was also inspired by the specificity of technique in the historic tradition, with substantial variation between locales. Native clays were combined with unique combinations of mineral and organic tempers to alter the working and fired properties of the material, and construction and firing techniques developed distinct local variations as well. Understanding the diversity of historic ceramics gave me a sense of the vast material possibilities at my doorstep, and I realized that focusing my practice on local materials would situate my work explicitly within its unique geographic and historic context. The places I could access, the materials I could collect, and the time I had to do so were the boundaries to my exploration, and the limitations of my personal capacity seemed very much in keeping with the historic tradition of northern ceramics.
Beyond a central focus on local materials, the ceramic tradition of this region inspired another element of my work, less consciously connected but sprung from the same body of research. Many of the pottery sherds collected in archaeological sites display patterned impressions. Some of these are the result of the construction method, but some are the result of tools designed to leave a symbolic mark, such as this bone paddle from Kotzebue in the University of Alaska Museum of the North collection.
While doing this research, I casually modified some of my old wooden ceramic tools by whittling their tips into various shapes in order to play around with embossed designs on clay surfaces. A student in the Native Arts studio, Jesse Hensel, offered his scraps of teak wood and helped fashion a small collection of simple shapes: chevrons, lines, triangles, and circles. I soon departed from using these tools for decorative patterns on unrelated forms and began using them to shape the surface of randomly shaped chunks of clay. This process led to surprising results and I have continued to use this highly “mannered” approach to clay as a balancing antidote to my explorations with the raw material, appearing in my thesis work as the manipulation method of the porcelain in the prosthetics and nucleations series.
CONTEMPORARY ART
There are so many artists whose work I am moved by, but I have struggled with identifying sculptors or ceramic artists who I can point to as directly inspiring my thesis work. Instead I will include here a few artists who I think serve as fundamental inspiration in my approach to manipulating the three-dimensional world, as well as a few that I have recently discovered.
Andy Goldsworthy, master manipulator of ephemeral color and form in nature. When I was a child growing up in nature-gaga Seattle, his posters adorned the walls of every dentist office and bank lobby and his books sat next to the mandatory rake-able zen gardens on coffee tables from hotels to homes. I can’t help but think my exposure to him was a profound early influence. As a child who spent much of their time building stick cities for bugs and ballgowns for fairies out of carefully stacked flowers, I delighted in the absolute excellence of the way he played. Like me, he was coaxing from the natural randomness of the world a simple orderliness born of his own desire to see more clearly what was in his mind’s eye: a chain of autumn leaves, organized in a gradient from red to green, stitched together with twigs. Or a bed of split stones, scraped against each other to lighten their broken edges and arranged to form a continuous line in the void between their halves.
| Andy Goldsworthy
Carefully broken pebbles scratched white with another stone St. Abbs, Scotland 1985 |
Diary: 1st June
In the evening went to small beach to work as the sun went down – time the completion of work with sundown – broken stones -cracked in two -not easy. Scratched white around cracks- made a sort of spiral which suited this work – this is how forms such as spirals/circles/balls appear – out of the making and not taken out there to be imposed. |
Goldsworthy’s work made it abundantly clear to me that the only requirements for the creative act were a special level of attention to one’s surroundings and an exploratory sense of play, and this attitude remains central to my approach. Whether at play in the field or the studio, I am driven by a desire to delineate the form of my instinct, both nebulous and shifty, which only becomes clear and bounded through the deliberate act of searching for it.
MARY OLIVER
This same sensibility infuses the work of Mary Oliver, whose poetry somehow distills for me the hall of mirrors between the inner world and the outer world into universal truths. For her, too, a hyper-attunement to the world is the means by which the normal confines of individual experience are transcended. In her poem The Dipper, to which I do a great disservice by offering only an excerpt here, she describes the “bridge of understanding” that exists beyond language:
there being no words to transcribe, I had to
bend forward, as it were,
into his frame of mind, catching
everything I could in the tone,
cadence, sweetness, and briskness
of his affirmative report
That yearning to break through our isolated perspective and experience the universal is, in itself, a universal experience. The sharing of frame of mind that cannot be transcribed is, I think, what causes art to resonate with us so uniquely.
CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS
The first time I felt true, full-body, tingly awe in the presence of a ceramic artifact was the first time I saw bricks that had been through many years of wood firings in a soda kiln. Wood ash and soda is carried throughout the kiln by the flames, interacting with silica in the clay to form a glass on the fired ware, but simultaneously depositing a natural glaze on every surface it contacts. Hard bricks are used as stilts to hold up each shelf in the kiln, and this particular batch was being thrown out because they had collapsed and fused together. The buildup of color and texture from years of firings had formed a dazzling matrix around the hard right angles of the bricks, which were frozen in place in a gravity-defying tumble, and I remember thinking that it was the most exciting ceramic sculpture I had ever seen. I was attracted not only to the aesthetic qualities of this amalgam –– the rigid geometry of brick against the amorphous flow of glass –– but also to the sense that it was a historic artifact, representing years of firings and the specific conditions of each one. It did not matter that this kiln log was illegible in a traditional manner; as a document it conveyed its history concretely.
I don’t remember the where or when details of the next time I was captivated by ceramic sculpture, but I do remember the image. It was a strange form that could have been a vessel or a figurative reference but maybe was neither, and the form itself was really just a supporting act for the surface of the object: heavily textured with stalactites built-up by what I assumed was the result of repeated spray application of acidly-bright matte glazes. It was the work of Ron Nagle, a California sculptor who works on a diminutive scale, although the first images I saw loom monumental in my mind. Looking back, I think that this work resonated with me because of the primacy of his process. Having observed in my own experiences the architecture created by tiny paint particles settling on themselves, I felt, through the object, a kind of kindred spirit with its maker. The piece did not disclose some profound secret of the universe, but it did give me a profound sense of connection to its creator (OMG I LIKE THE WAY PAINT DOES THAT TOO!!!) in our mutual delight at certain properties of sprayed pigments.
Ron Nagle
Matte King Cole, 1985
3x2x2in
I will be the first to admit that I do not closely follow contemporary ceramics, or the art world in general, but over the years certain images have lodged in my mind. One of them is an image of what seems to be a large industrial mechanism, perhaps part of a giant engine, made of ceramic. When asked as an MFA candidate to diagram the position of my work within art history, and the history of my medium, I felt drastically at a loss and began to search for information on this piece. I never did find the image I remember, but in searching for it I came across the work of Tim Rowan, a ceramic artist based in the Hudson Valley. Working with mechanical forms that reference gears and drill bits, he also uses raw, locally-collected clays for much of his work, resulting in anachronistically elegant Flintstonian artifacts.
Tim Rowan
Untitled #06061, 2006
12x24x14in
“Ceramics” refers first to a classification of materials, and second to an artistic discipline. With respect to this order, most ceramicists have a deep technical understanding of the chemical and physical properties of their material in a way that is unique to the discipline. Historically, of course, all ceramics were created from locally-sourced materials, but even today, with easy access to processed materials from around the world, a handful of ceramicists continues to explore their surroundings for useful clays and minerals. Here in Fairbanks, there was an active relationship between the pottery community and the Usibelli Coal Mine which provided interior ceramicists with the overburden of clay excavated along the coal seam in Healy. Most well-known among the enthusiasts was the late Liz Berry, who worked almost exclusively with the Healy clay.
Liz Berry throwing a pot with clay from the Usibelli Coal Mine in Healy.
It was stories about people like Liz, and other local potters’ experiments with digging their own clay, that led me to some of my first collection sites in and around the Healy area and my thesis work is directly indebted to those who preceded me in this practice.
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THESIS PROJECT
THE WORK
My thesis work is the result of explorations along a material gradient from raw to refined. During my first critique with faculty, I was asked what my “thesis” would be. I remember scoffing at the idea that I might know what the future would hold, but said, impulsively, that I was going to make a “baroque altar to the elements” and showed the group a somewhat abstract drawing of a rock with golden beams emanating from its center. At the time, I was not quite sure what I meant by that statement, and could not further describe the details of how I might approach such a task. It just sort of spilled out. I could point to the sources of those interests but I could not yet envision what the physical manifestation of that would be. Three years later, though, it is clear to me that I am still working on that same program. The material experiments that make up my thesis work are artifacts of reverence for this landscape, its people and its history, that I have come to know through the act of making. For simplicity of description I have grouped this work into categories, although the ideas and processes bleed across these superimposed boundaries.
SEDIMENT BLOCKS
The Sediment Blocks mark a turning point in my engagement with ceramic materials. Previous experimentation with local material had involved an enormous investment in processing, and the results were somehow inversely proportionate to the delightfulness of the original material in relation to the effort expended to process them. I needed a way to address this problem and I stumbled upon a solution through observations of the landscape itself, in the sedimentary layers of diverse material visible in canyons and cutbanks where I was collecting material. At the time, I was becoming increasingly aware of my own ceramics practice as a miniature rock cycle. Studio ceramics, in general, rely on the mechanical erosion of minerals into fine powders, the mixing and combination of these materials, the pressure and force of hands and tools on the resulting amalgam, and finally the exposure to intense heat to melt it all together. In the planetary rock cycle, mountains erode to particles by wind and water, the minerals are mixed and remixed as they are deposited or subducted below the crust, and finally the intense pressure and heat of the earth’s core recombines them and returns them to the surface transformed, where a geologist might eventually drill a core sample to decipher the story of their creation. The Sediment Blocks series penetrates my own miniature rock cycle as a ceramicist, making the chronology and forces of their creation the center of their aesthetic.
In the window between spring breakup and the autumnal blanketing of the landscape with snow, each weekend was spent collecting natural clays and minerals from lakes, rivers, and exposed hillsides around the region until weather no longer permitted, creating a stockpile of material to explore back in the studio. While many contemporary ceramics rely on a vast library of industrial materials to create claybodies and glazes with specific properties subservient to the intentions of the maker, my process had to be informed by the inherent character of the local clays and minerals. In response, I embraced their natural tendencies and positioned them as the basis of the aesthetic. The technique I developed involves casting materials layer by layer into a ceramic mold, firing them together, sometimes in multiple iterations, and finally sawing cross sections or drilling cores from the fired block to reveal the material strata and the interactions between them. The resulting artifacts clearly reference geology: sedimentary layers, caves, crevices and rifts that indicate both the process of their formation and the physical tensions they embody. This work was born out of a deep desire to understand the material foundations of our surroundings here in the Alaskan interior, and my multifaceted explorations of the subject have stimulated this unconventional approach to ceramic work. The technique I developed not only addresses the technical challenges of working with diverse raw materials, but also establishes my studio practice as a method of continual inquiry into the landscape that surrounds me.
READYMADES
The Readymades are a series of rocks altered with glazes made from industrially processed minerals. The idea for this work came from a trip to Suntrana Canyon in Healy, home of the Usibelli Coal mine that powers a significant portion of interior Alaska with its black gold. The mining operations moved further up the valley, but the remnants of the original coal seam are visible as a black crumbling streak along the canyon walls. A layer of high-quality clay is deposited adjacent to the coal seam. The mining operation once stockpiled this clay for local potters as it excavated the coal but the practice was terminated decades ago, like many things good and fun, for liability reasons. I had been told it was still possible to dig clay in the area, although no one could provide specifics. When I finally found the canyon, I was thrilled by its unique geologic beauty; polychrome layers of sediments that rival the Badlands in their spectrum. As I tried to determine where exactly one could dig clay in this canyon, I noticed that the belts of broken red shale had the texture and weight of fired earthenware clay and I filled my backpack with them to test back in the studio. On closer inspection, these platelets revealed the imprints of ancient plants and I became thrilled at the prospect of having found naturally prefabricated ceramics from an ancient epoch, sintered by the pressure of the earth or a burn of the adjacent coal seam, delivered to the surface and made accessible by the modern practice of industrial coal extraction. I had always been told that rocks explode in the kiln, but these appeared so close to clay I had to try.
Back in the studio, I modified a heavily metallic low-fire glaze to test on this shale, hoping that the low thermal expansion of the recipe would help the glaze to “fit” the rocks without cracking or peeling off as it cooled. It worked, and the Readymades were born. The term “readymades” of course refers to Marcel Duchamp’s industrial products (snow shovel, urinal, etc.) that he would sign and submit to society as objects of art, based on his nomination of them as such. Taking a naturally occurring material from the ground and using it as a substrate for glaze might seem too much a departure from Duchamp’s original intentions to warrant copping the name, but I couldn’t help but think of them as readymade ceramics just waiting for a signature splash of glaze. Over the next year I collected rocks nearly everywhere I collected clay, recognizing that they were ultimately the same material although the variation in their scale and progression along the homogenizing journey of erosion gave them uniquely different properties. I continued to experiment with a variety of lowfire and midfire glazes on diverse types of rock with varied and often unpredictable results. The worst-case scenario I encountered were rocks in which a critical component of the matrix would burn off or become brittle in the kiln and the once-solid object would be reduced to a powdery pile. In other cases, certain rocks would melt and swell like biscuits in the oven, and in others the minerals would react to the glaze application with a lovely halo of color.
The glaze application initially took the form of simple circles superimposed on an appropriate face of each rock. This shape made it possible to view the rocks in any orientation, but also had a distinct contrast to the faceted forms of the minerals and suggested the element of human interaction. As the series expanded, often as a way to pass time while waiting for other projects to dry or set-up or cool down, the geometric shapes I applied to their surfaces evolved to include triangles and pentagons and later just dots or patterns of symbols like the ones used on geologic maps. The main intent was to respond to the shape and surface of the rock while imposing a human mark on the natural form.
NUCLEATIONS
The Nucleations are a series of heavily textured small porcelain forms fired in the atmospheric kilns. The material, English porcelain so pure and homogeneous it feels like butter in the hands, occupies the far end of the spectrum of refinement from the natural clays and recycled scraps I normally work with. This exploration predates the other work in my thesis, but grew as a collection alongside the experiments with native clays and minerals, almost as a relieving antidote to their roughage. Constructed as individual forms, the Nucleations are meant to be arranged in groupings, clustered or stacked together. Like a pile of rocks, they are multifaceted units with no specific orientation, inviting active participation in the endless variations of form made possible through the rearrangement and reconfiguration of their groupings.
Nucleation refers to the formation of a stable nucleus, the first step in the crystallization process, where molecules in a solution self-organize into a repeating pattern. The structure of the nucleus defines the ordered pattern of the subsequent crystal growth: in a snowflake, the hexagonal arrangement of the water molecules in the nucleus dictates the hexagonal symmetry of all resulting growth. This is why you will never find a snowflake with pentagonal, octagonal, or any other symmetry.
With handmade tools inspired by my research into historic ceramic traditions of arctic Alaska, I began repetitively impressing shapes into chunks of wet porcelain torn or sliced off a larger block, allowing the random curves and crevasses of each chunk to dictate the direction and density of marks as I worked around it with the tool. The resulting objects have a crystal-like appearance, the repeated shapes change subtly in scale as they traverse and define the contours of the form. The initial mark I make with a tool becomes the nucleus upon which the pattern of subsequent marks is built, and the growth pattern interacts with the underlying form to create complex objects that cannot be predetermined. Many of these objects exhibit multiple nucleation points, and the growth of mark-making from one nucleus is limited where it encounters the growth of marks from another nucleus somewhere else on the form. Similarly, when the nucleations are grouped together, the shape and orientation of the initial unit dictates the orientation of subsequent units, whether the intent is the alignment or juxtaposition of each unit’s facets. Like crystals and their nuclei this series is formally dictated, at the individual and community scale, by some initial choice of shape and orientation.
PROSTHETICS
The Prosthetics series was an expansion on the Readymades idea. I had made specific rules for myself as I collected rocks, to avoid picking up every beautiful thing I came across. One of the criteria for acceptable collection was rocks that were broken in place. Later, in the studio, these broken rocks seemed to demand my attention with the severe interruption of their overall forms. I started creating prosthetic extensions to their truncations out of porcelain, using the same process as that of the Nucleations, adding an element of baroquely mannered material to their natural forms. I experimented with a variety of porcelain clay bodies and additives to adjust the shrinkage of the fired clay, but ultimately the shrinkage was beneficial. When wet, the seam between the rock and porcelain was so tightly fitting that it was hard to tell the rock was broken. Often, it looked like it had been simply covered with a porcelain skin. The shrinkage of the fired forms meant that the fit of each prosthetic was no longer flush with its broken rock counterpart, emphasizing the incompleteness of each form, while the shape of the seam made it clear that they belong specifically to each
other.
THE EXHIBITION
In archaeology, the excavation of a site takes a formal approach to exploring, recording, and studying a place of particular interest. As one digs, the geologic strata reveal the passage of time and give context to the artifacts discovered. The design of the gallery as an excavation site was meant to transport the audience into an environment that encouraged exploratory interaction, by providing clues about the physical and conceptual context in which the artifacts were created. The exhibit became an abstract representation of my own experience in making the work, three years of inquiry at the intersection of geology, history, and industry at this specific point in time and space: interior Alaska in the anthropocene.
Early in my final year of the MFA program I wrote down a list of criteria for my show, with the idea that it would give me a specific structure to work towards while allowing for continued experimentation and growth in relationship to the materials I had collected and techniques I had developed to work with them. The criteria were 1) something monumental, 2) something intimate, 3) something moving, and 4) something interactive. At the time, I wrote in my notebook that “these components are the core features of my own experience at work and play in this wild and enormous landscape, and provide the focal points and directives for a shifting of consciousness from one scale to another until finding those fleeting and magical moments where the mind accommodates all scales simultaneously.” These criteria ultimately guided my choices in the design of the exhibition space as well as what work to include in the show.
The addition of a large entry wall was meant to accomplish a number of things. I have always been bothered by the fact that the first thing you see when you enter the UAF gallery is the exit door, and I wanted to interrupt the direct corridor from entrance to exit and redirect the flow of people around and through the space. Furthermore, the wall provided a necessary transition zone between the outside world and the immersive environment I aimed to create, introducing the project and establishing a directional path through the exhibit. The dimensions and placement of the wall were calculated to block the view of the mud walls until a visitor had fully stepped across the threshold and entered the gallery.
Facing the entrance was the show title, embedded within a grid of test tiles representing each of the clays I had collected. These were the same test tiles that hung in my studio to guide my material choices when creating the sediment blocks. Each sample appears in its raw state, fired to pyrometric cone 04 (~1940º F) and fired to cone 6 (~2232º F). On the adjacent wall was a map of Alaska showing the collection sites, with samples of the raw clays pinned to their place of origin. Due to space and scale, the map was simplified and the scale of the interior expanded to maximize sample representation in the densest collection regions.
Along the wall leading into the gallery were rocks collected in field, mostly from the same sites as the clay collection. At the far corner, the natural rocks were interspersed with rock-like clay forms and some of the prosthetic rocks, introducing the shift from raw materials to the altered materials that resulted from my interventions in the studio.
Past the transitional corridor of the entryway, the walls were covered with the same raw clays that had been used to create the sediment blocks, suggesting the visitor had entered a subterranean environment. Unprocessed clay collected from Dry Creek, Chulitna River, Gunnysack Creek and Gulkana Glacier were chosen for their colors and texture and applied directly to the walls to suggest sedimentary layers of earth. This treatment, while accomplishing the criteria of creating something monumental, also provided a means by which the materials could be represented in both their raw and processed form. The mudded areas were interrupted by strips of exposed white wall where the display shelves for the sediment blocks were attached, so that they appeared to be continuous lines shifting from the two dimensional mural of the wall into the three dimensional gallery space. The white shelves provided necessary contrast against which to display the ceramic work, and the extension of the white stripe up the wall was meant to suggest the human interaction with our geologic environment, like a pipe, or a mine shaft, or a drilled core in cross section.
Drift Mining in Frozen Ground, from a 1909 mining survey, Through the Yukon and Alaska.
As the visitor completed a circular path around the perimeter of the gallery they would encounter the periscope (perrinscope, officially) meant to offer a view to the world above ground, to the source of the minerals filling the subterranean world in the gallery. Embedded in the periscope was a projection of video taken at the collection sites, focusing on the movements and patterns of deposit of particulate minerals in the twilight zone between rushing river and static riverbank. The view through the periscope collapsed time and space to provide a condensed version of my visual experience across diverse collection sites and through the changing of the seasons, and offered a closer look at the natural processing of the materials whose flow I had diverted temporarily into the gallery. Audio of the river sounds, recorded on location with better equipment at a later date, played throughout the gallery. Although separate, the audio often seemed to sync with the loop of video, and the combination subtly fulfilled my criteria for something moving in the space.
In the middle of the subterranean zone, the Readymades and Prosthetics were arranged in groupings on low horizontal pedestals that continued a spiral path through the space. I had struggled to figure out how to fulfill my criteria of having something interactive in the show, because I wanted the invitation for interaction to be self-evident, without resorting to explicit instructions on how to behave. I had ultimately given up on this aspect as a challenge for a future project, and was overwhelmingly pleased and surprised that the groupings of readymades begged for impromptu rearrangement. Every time I entered the gallery during the course of the show I saw evidence of this tinkering, little rocks would be perched on others or regrouped to someone’s particular liking. This sense of playful aesthetic discovery through experimentation was precisely the kind of experience, analogous to my own, that I had hoped to foster. I am still not sure what exactly compelled people to rearrange these groupings even in the gallery setting (the apparent sturdiness of rocks? the toy-like scale? the legible spontaneity of the groupings?) but at its core I think it resonates with a basic human desire to manipulate our environment in the search for better or more pleasing solutions. Thus, unintentionally, or perhaps subconsciously, the something interactive criteria was fulfilled.
In the center of the subterranean zone, at the end of a spiral path of movement through the gallery, was a sparkly mound of porcelain nucleations and pink rock clones which had been revamped with the addition of gold X’s. This amalgamation of highly-mannered porcelain and heavily processed quartz represented the far end of the spectrum from raw to refined, the polar opposite of the natural rocks and the raw mud walls. In the context of the gallery-as-excavation-site, meant to reveal a gradient of human interaction with the lithosphere, I envisioned this central stash as the mythical place on the map where X marks the spot to the imagined treasure. But for all its glimmer and purity, it is not meant to represent a hierarchy of materials. In contrast, I think it ultimately serves to cast the unfussy beauty of the raw materials that surround it into high relief.
5
WHERE I HAVE BEEN, WHERE I AM GOING
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As the conduit for this project, I relied on the knowledge, strength, wisdom and generosity of so many people to bring it to life. Thank you, thank you, thank you:
Jonny Nations for his endless support and encouragement and for helping with every aspect of this project for the past three years.
Carol Hoefler for encouraging me to apply for the MFA program, and for the sustenance of her enthusiasm and support since the first day I stepped foot in the art building. None of this would have happened without her motivation.
My committee for generously giving freely of their time, knowledge, opinions, technical expertise and support throughout my studies; and for being both mentors and friends:
Jim Brashear
Wendy Croskrey
Mareca Guthrie
Dakaxeen Mehner
Teresa Shannon for introducing me to the chemistry of ceramics, for providing the experimental forum in which this project was incubated, and for continued support and assistance as the project developed.
David Mollett for his good humour and guidance as my printmaking mentor, and, as the department chair, for the endless support of (and paperwork for) my diverse academic explorations.
Mike Nackoneczny for his acerbic wit and honest critiques.
Pep Manalang for her patience and humor in our shared studio, for sharing an ongoing discourse on art, philosophy, and bootyshaking; for making sure I took time to attend to the health of my body; and for her help installing, documenting, and photographing the exhibit… and then pulling all nighters with me to help return the gallery to a white box.
Ptarmigan Teal, Stephen Sullivan, Quill Teal Sullivan, Nicholas McElroy and Robin Stein for coming all the way to Alaska to spend a week of long laborious days in a windowless gallery, assisting with the installation, fabrication, and documentation of the exhibition.
John Smelter for sharing his knowledge and taking the time to offer brilliant and honest critiques.
Jed Williams for responding to my initial inquiry to the pottery community regarding local clays, for providing the first samples for experimentation from his own collection, and encouraging this project from the very beginning. And for endless good cheer and help with kiln building, kiln firing, and so much more.
Ken Severin for his mentorship, enthusiasm, and guidance, and for allowing me to use the Advanced Instrument Laboratory to analyze samples and document the tiny world of micro ceramics.
Franta Majs for generously teaching me to analyze mineral samples using x-ray diffraction, and offering encouragement and ideas for my project.
Mary Van Muelken for her mentorship and facilitation of my participation in the Resilience and Adaptation Program and for her generous help de-mudding the gallery walls after the show.
Todd Brinkman for his mentorship in the Resilience and Adaptation Program and for serving as the outside observer for my thesis defense.
JR Ancheta for photographing the opening reception and the installation.
Maya Salganek and Chris Tucker for video documentation of the project.
And to everyone else who has taken the time to speak with me, guide me, and has held open the doors of the studio when my arms are full of buckets. This project, like everything else, was made possible by an infinitely complex network of minds and materials, the boundary of which I could never hope to define. It fills me with awe and gratitude.
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