“Dust” adventures continued yesterday and today.

Yesterday morning, I biked over to someone’s house to pick up a used coffee grinder for $5. As I discovered by testing this out own my own grinder at home, this technology is lifesaving (a bad joke for the one or two people reading all my posts). I can now grind a handful of dry clay pieces into to a fine powder in roughly 3.5 seconds. Bits of plant matter included.

As you can also see, I’ve been busy with the local clay that I got from Jeff Meldrum, a very cool artist doing work such as Art for Animals.

Jeff dug this clay up from a band of it he’s found on his land in Northern Saskatchewan, the very same land where he installs sculptures and then has motion-detecting cameras “shoot” animals interacting with them: “In recruiting wild animals as stand-ins for the human viewer/collaborator, I hope to subvert the dichotomy of human vs. animal which has erroneously placed humankind at the top of the pyramid” ( Art for Animals). I picked the clay up from his place in Regina two days ago, and yesterday got busy grinding and applying it to a new dinner plate-sized mold I made last weekend.

I applied very little at a time, misting it with water and occasionally stopping to tamp it with a spoon.

This afternoon, I returned to see how it dried overnight, and I’m pleased enough with the result; the plate made of this pulverized local clay can exist as a free-standing entity! The fact that it’s local and that looks more like dust (especially thinking of Great Depression dust) than the porcelain version does means it’s the winner. I’m nowhere near finished experimenting with this project, but at least I’ll have something to show at Neutral Ground and to the End of Semester Review Committee that I feel is as good as I can get it for now.

I went back to check on its drying this evening, and I was able to move it off of the paper and board I’d set it up on and onto a small photo-box a fellow ceramics student owns. At least at this stage, while it’s still quite wet, I can actually lift it with my hands. This assures me that I’ll be able to set up a plate like this at Neutral Ground tomorrow (I’ll create it in the gallery tomorrow and then remove the mold on Friday); it also means my next step, photographing a plate like this blowing away, will be another challenge to overcome.

I like that it definitely reads as dirt. I’m not sure how much the idea of dust comes across. I’m also slightly concerned that it could read as cow pie. It reminds me of of the dried camel dung patties that we burned for cooking fuel when stranded in Mongolia, twenty years ago. There’s a pile of them to the right of the fire pit in this old photo I dug up.

My neighbour-friends tell me that from photos shared, this dust plate look more like plate than dung, which is reassuring. One of them observed that “the drying process reflects the drought.” The other commented that the object reminds them of “the cross section of a tree or fungus” — interesting! My husband thought “tree” when he saw it too.

That’s where things are at with “Dust” for now. I’ll see if I can create a “Dust Bowl” of this material tomorrow, if I have time between work, installing at Neutral Ground, and then hosting a For Our Kids meeting in the evening. It’ll be a full day.