Clay takes me here, to this place of the blue chalcedony of cold water and glacial silt. Occasionally, when I’m on the wheel and the conditions are just right (I’m not in a rush to get anywhere; I’m alone in the studio), I experience the same sensation of peace I get when I am in the mountains, away from civilization. When the clay is centered and spinning under my hands, I pause and watch the slip build up between my fingers. My shoulders drop, my heartbeat slows, and I nearly stop breathing. I am transposed to the bottom of a glacial lake; I’m a million years old. The clay spins mega-annums over my hands, and the rest of me is taken in. For just these few moments, everything is fine. The busyness goes quiet. I am okay. The world is okay. All of us, all of our pain and all of the problems we’re causing, are gone.  

The rest of the time, I am acutely aware of the state of the world, and it’s not good. With a modicum of education on climate change, empathy for the world’s living creatures, and worry for my son’s future, I have a lot of anger and fear about climate change. I can direct much of the anger I have at the corporations who are largely at fault for this situation, but it is complicated: in the “developed” nations of the world, we are all implicated, and the story of how we got here started around 15,000 years ago when we realized we could “break the earth” (via agriculture) for our own sustenance. As Roy Scranton says, “not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe.” In terms of the fear I have for our shared future, I try to keep it from seeping in, but this takes enormous energy. Anger and fear are always on my back, and I know I’m not alone in this. For those of us who are aware of the situation, we are holding our breath: will things work out? Will the life supporting systems of the planet, its weather systems, ecosystems, food chains everything we need to survive, remain intact?  

Clay is symbolically and literally a part of us: it is soil, food, life. The plants that we and our domesticated animals eat require the elements found in the earth, some of which are also found in clay. Soils damaged by our agricultural over-use can be remediated with a treatment of clay. I don’t go so far as to believe that by touching this substance I am imbibing its life-force, enriching my being, replenishing my elements. I’m too scientific for that. But touching this material, I can, for just that moment, imagine myself in another world; I can leave the Anthropocene for an altogether different time and space, one that existed before us. Through clay, I feel rivers and lakes, mountains covered in forest, flora and fauna, systems functioning the way they have for spans of time incomprehensible to us. Quartz and feldspar in the porcelain I love to throw take me to a place of glacial flour, also known as rock flour, the silty particles that erode from mountains and are carried in ice and water to lakes where they are released and stay so nearly weightless they are suspended, refracting light in such a way as to give these lakes their milky turquoise, blue, or green hues. Water in these colours is so beautiful that it brings me calm.  

I’ve tried to leave ceramics for other forms of artmaking that are less exploitive of the earth’s resources and carry a smaller carbon footprint. It’s been almost a year since I’ve last been on the wheel, and I’m now realizing all that working in clay gives me and how much I miss it. The pots I made in the past and use at home remind me of what I am now lacking each time I see them: a cup, a bowl, a plate are items I took for granted in the past. “Art,” I told myself, meant doing more than creating these simple objects of daily life.

Now, however, the items I made that live in my kitchen cupboards are becoming more precious with each day. They stand apart from the mass produced tableware I own. They signify something more than simply their function. I must not break that nearly perfect cup – that cup whose form and surface speak something to me in a language I can’t translate into words. The bowl that looks so beautiful with soup, or grapes, or anything really – the joy it gives me, and the reminder of the clay it came from, is more profound than I’d originally given it credit.

In addition to their connection to the natural world, I’m starting to see something else in these pots that makes them special. What does it mean that I created these objects that give me joy? What does it mean to be good at something? I think of Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be of Use”:

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

(lines 18-26)

It’s obvious to me why Piercy chose to employ pottery in this poem. A simple vase. A simple pitcher. We strive to make a difference in this world in order to give our lives meaning. I know I’ve “cried” for “work that is real,” but I’ve never known entirely what that work would be. I’m starting to wonder if having a competency in something, to know how to do it well, must be at least a part of doing “real” work, even if that work is as “common as mud.” So be it. “Common” isn’t necessarily pejorative. Childbirth is the other example that I’ve experienced of this understanding that something can be both common and extraordinary. “Common” doesn’t need to imply any lack of importance, or magic. Common work, “worth doing well done,” is meaningful enough.  

In We’re Doomed: Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change, Roy Scranton is upfront about “doom,” yet the book isn’t entirely focused on his own anger and fear. It’s not only about the “doom”; it’s also about the “now what?” Scranton writes that “[t]he human ability to make meaning is so versatile, so powerful, that it can make almost any existence tolerable, even a life of unending suffering, so long as that life is woven into a bigger story that makes it meaningful” (5). In this book about what may be inevitably at this point the beginning of end of human civilization, as we know it at least, Scranton offers something like hope, or at least a strategy for survival; he tells us that “we hold within ourselves the power to change our lives—wholly, utterly—by changing what our lives mean” (7).

I cannot do much to change the course of climate change beyond the time and money I give to environmental organizations. In fact, I feel like the busyness of participating in activism amid a day job, artmaking, and parenting is proving to be too much. With the urgency I know this crisis demands, and my urgency to raise as much awareness of the situation as I can, I’ve been missing something important – that sustainability must also involve the personal as well as the global. I need to be able to sustain myself, and recently, I’ve become attuned to a major lack in my life: joy. Without it, it’s hard to keep fighting for the future, for “[i]f we kill all pleasure in the actual processes of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?” (Orwell qtd in. Scranton 324).

Works Cited

Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” To Be of Use. Doubleday, 1973.

Scranton, Roy. We’re Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change. Soho Press Inc., 2018.