Madeleine and I carried out our picnic this past Saturday, October 15th. After much processing and producing with clay and food over the last several weeks, it was wonderful to see our efforts materialize for this event. We lucked out weather-wise, with sunny skies and a high of around 17. Two days earlier, it had snowed.

Madeleine prepared a feast for us full of incredibly rich colours, textures and tastes. Each dish was composed at least in part of food from her garden, her sister’s farm, or items foraged.

The warm oranges, reds, and purples complemented the cool dark olive colour of the unfired clay beautifully. The bulk of the plates we used were unfired, and most had cracks. The cracks turned out to be entirely suitable though. The decadence of the dishes Madeleine served contrasted them very well, embodying the fact that we are feasting while fully aware that everything around us is falling apart. Can we still enjoy this meal while experiencing the deep grief and anxiety we have for the fact that feasts like this one may soon be impossible? Madeline shared that she sometimes wonders what food she’ll miss the most in the future. I’ve wondered the same thing.

I think that many of us are trying to figure out how to carry on enjoying our lives while aware of what we’re losing. My 11 year-old son is even facing this struggle. One evening last week, I asked him if he wanted to redecorate his room. He’s had a dozen or so posters from the World Wildlife Fund up on his walls for the last several years. We received them from the WWF as a thank you for donations we’d made to symbolically adopt an animal. Wildlife featured heavily in his earlier years as he’d spent endless time watching BBC’s Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and other nature documentaries as a toddler and young child. When he was five, in response to my question about how he could recognize an opossum from a photo of one in his animal encyclopedia, he said “because of the opposable thumbs and the prehensile tail, of course!” In response to my question about redecorating his room and removing these posters, he said that no, he wanted to keep the animals up on the walls as a reminder of what we’re losing. “The tiger,” he said sadly looking around at the posters. “Oh, the arctic hair!” This is literally what he said, and it felt like a punch to my gut. On top of my own sense of loss, I’m sad for my son’s.

This extreme sense of grief has really had a hold over me over the last few months. It’s critical that I find a way to be able to once again take pleasure in what I’m so fortunate to have in my life. I need to do this for myself, but I also need to model this attitude for my son.

The picnic was a clear manifestation of this situation and what I need to do: I need to shift focus from my cracked plates to the delicacies that were placed on them, or better yet, I need to recognize that the food was in fact even more beautiful because of how it was offset by the cracked plates. Furthermore, on top of the absolute beauty of the picnic items, there is the care and sense of community that Madeleine has offered me by serving me this food. During the picnic, I asked her a question that is often on my mind: is collective loss any greater than loss at the individual level? Her answer was that she’s found that on the contrary, being able to share an experience of loss with others is helpful.

So many are sharing the experience of environmental grief that there is a relatively new word coined to describe it: solastalgia. Glenn Albrecht formed this portmanteau of the words solace and nostalgia to describe “a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (“Solastalgia” 35). Unlike eco-anxiety, which is anxiety about what the future will look like as a result of environmental crisis, solastalgia is the feeling of depression caused by current and predicted environmental loss. While nostalgia is the experience of longing for a home that is far away, solastalgia is the longing for a home one can never return to because environmental change has destroyed it. The destruction of one’s home (which could be an local environment or the planet at large) involves a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. It’s not good. Albrecht offers two suggestions to help those experiencing solastalgia. First, he says, “clear acknowledgement of that which needs to be confronted can be an empowering experience” (36). Secondly, “a commitment to engage in action to support distressed people and heal distressed environments is itself a profoundly healing” (36). Madeleine and I are both confronting that which we need to confront, and through our own contributions to this picnic, we have offered each other support.

Now that we’ve had our picnic, we are both processing what it really meant to each of us, and what we can take away from it. The documentation of this event will help me wrap my head around it. I’m looking forward to seeing the photographs and videos that Alex Tacik took for us. We’re grateful to him for his collaboration on this project, as the documentation will play such an important part, being the only lasting evidence of this event.

The only photos I have are ones I took after the feast, and even these communicate a lot to me.

Albrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia.” Alternatives Journal, vol. 36 (4/5), 2006, pp. 34-36.

Throwing with local clay is an exercise in failure. Unlike commercially made clays, this material I dig up from Madeleine’s garden creates all sorts of issues for the potter. Perhaps to the benefit of the plants that grow from this clay-soil we have here, this clay does not give up its moisture easily. It takes a very long time to dry pieces thrown with it, and in that process, they warp and crack excessively.

Of the several bowls, plates, and platters I’ve thrown over the last ten days, over half have cracked. There must be something in this clay’s chemical composition to blame for this.

Thinking about its composition leads me to thinking about its history. From where have its compounds originated, and how did they get here? Here I run up against my mind’s limitations of understanding the spans of time that created this land and landscape. I know from James Chappell’s The Potter’s Complete Book of Clay and Glazes that native earthenware clays like this one are what’s called “secondary clays,” meaning their materials “have been removed from the site of the parent rock by the forces of water, wind, or glacial action” (19). I love rocks, and have several pet ones. Holding them, they are entirely solid — rock-hard. I can’t fathom the process of erosion that leads such material to the fine particles of clay I also love to handle. I wonder what life on the planet will look like by the time our current mountains turn to clay. What life was here when this clay was solid rock? Clay reminds me that the world has not always been as human-centric as it is now. In other words, clay helps me understand that while human exceptionalism has led to the sixth mass extinction, it still exists as a blip in the scales of deep time.

Meanwhile, I’m here to make something, and I’m getting nowhere quick with Madeleine’s garden’s clay. Of course I realize that I’m the one causing these problems I’m having with it. I’m the one trying to control this substance, expecting it to behave as I want.

Here’s another example of how my plans for this clay are failing. This earthenware will not hold water. It’s not in its nature to do so. I’ve tested firing to different temperatures to see if I can get its pores to seal so it’ll be watertight, but it just doesn’t work. These cups and bowls continue to leak. My idea of leaving these pieces behind after the picnic to serve as bee homes and bird and bee baths is not going to come to fruition unless I alter this material somehow.

So, I’m faced with a decision about my work for this project. Should I embrace cracked and leaking bowls and plates because they say something about what I’m working through at the moment? After all, if these pieces are part of my response to environmental crisis, shouldn’t they be “broken”? Madeleine and I would need to drink our soup real fast before it disappears through the crack in its bowl.

Or, should I manipulate this material by adding other ingredients to it (such as frit to form a glaze). Doing so would then remove the element of using the land, pure, that I harvest from Madeleine’s garden, with all the meaning that has for us, but it would allow me to create pieces that could serve a purpose.

In other words, am I interested in creating work that is only really symbolic (“Amy Snider makes cracked bowls because, she says, the planet is cracked”), or do I want to make work that can be of some use, however small, to Madeleine’s garden? Am I willing to incorporate processed materials, with their own environmental footprints, to achieve the latter? (And really, isn’t it just a fool’s game to think we can help birds and bees at this stage?). Do I need to embrace the fact that there are no perfect solutions to the environmental problems we’ve created? I think, for example, of the problems with sourcing the materials needed for the batteries of electric vehicles that are supposed to be better for the planet. It often seems that our solutions cause further problems.

As my prof, Holly, has suggested that my primary focus for this semester should be to simply explore–try new thing, research, play with materials–I think it’s best if I not focus too much on having answers for all the questions above and just see what happens in the next two weeks before this picnic takes place (now set for October 15th). I’ll create a variety of pieces, some which will hold food better than others, and then consider how I feel about them after the event takes place.

One final question to myself for this post — can I actually convince myself that there is any way out of failure right now? Maybe failure is the invisible ingredient of this whole endeavor. Maybe I won’t feel right about anything I create these days, just because it doesn’t feel right to feel right right now… if that makes any sense at all. But here I may be walking into a paradox: if this work is about failure (ecosystem failure; failure of people to improve how we treat the planet; my own feeling of failure at coping with the situation; my failure at producing functional pieces out of only Madeleine’s garden clay), am I nonetheless trying to to perfect this failure somehow? What would good work about failure look like?

My brain hurts. I must be overthinking this. I’m not sure where to go from here.

Chappell, James. The Potter’s Complete Book of Clay and Glazes: A Comprehensive Guide to Formulating, Mixing, Applying, and Firing Clay Bodies and Glazes, 2nd ed., New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1991.