It’s the end of this spring course I’ve been taking with Lindsey French, and she’s asked me to reflect on my practice—where I want to take my work in the fall when I’ll need to begin preparing for my MFA graduating exhibit. What do I want to show people? She also asked me to consider how this show could support my practice rather than seeing it as only an end in itself (the end of my degree).

This is a challenge. First of all, I’m still hugely indecisive about just about everything in my day-to-day, and certainly about what I’d like this show to be. The impetus keeps shifting. This is a problem for someone approaching the equivalent of thesis-writing time. Secondly, it seems impossible to imagine myself having an art practice, so I can’t say how I’d like to see this degree support it. Still, I’ll try my best here.

First premise—I’d to give viewers of my show the experience of entering a space that is different from the ones they normally inhabit. I’ve been considering ways to do this by employing largely this local clay I’ve been digging up from Madeleine Greenway’s garden. If I use a traditional (indoor) gallery setting, I can imagine covering its floor with a liquid slip of this clay, meaning that viewers would need to leave footprints wherever they walked in the gallery to look at other pieces or video I’d include. Maddie’s clay does crazy things when it dries on certain types of flooring.

My issue here is that this may not convey what I’d like this show to convey. It’s true I once tried to get clay to crack in ways that would mimic drought-parched land, as I wrote about over a year ago. I failed at getting processed clay (terracotta) to crack in a way that satisfied me, and now, with this local clay, I may be able to. That makes some sense.

However, this work took place was when I was representing the physical effects of climate change in my pieces (melting glaciers, drought, species loss, etc). More recently, my work has been focused on the effects of climate change on me and my family, personally. The issue here is that this effect is a moving target moving between complete despair and some kind of acceptance (never hope), yet I need to know what to focus my work on for the next year… now.

There something about the frailty of the forms that this clay allows me to create which I’m drawn to, something about our own frailty as a species and/or the frailty of Earth’s ecosystems as a result of what we’re doing to them. As Lindsey said during our chat last week, the cups and bowls, as opposed to the splotches of liquid clay drying on the floor, are very human, and this appeals to me.

So, another option is to cover the entire floor of a gallery with thin unfired bowls. I’ve tested out what this could look like on a smaller scale, and outdoors.

I did a couple other tests with these thin forms in the last week.

We had one more good rain, so I was able to get a second take at this test, too.

I also experimented with putting the clay cast of Jakob’s face outside in my garden to let it grow, though I’ll need to repeat this test with a new “face” using a few things I learned from this time through.

Another decision I’m still not able to make is whether to have this show indoors or not. I’ll need to spend the next while thinking about how site is important to my work, and also how I’d bring viewers into an experience that may be physically remote (distant) and weather-dependent. Will the show itself be an event, a performance of ephemerality, or will I rely on documentation of an outdoor ephemeral piece to reach a wider audience?

Also, if I see this show as first and foremost important to myself, as opposed to for my profs, I’ll likely have a different set of outcomes and a different way of measuring success. These are each points I need to spend more time considering.

Just as importantly, if I wish to proceed with clay as my primary medium, and Maddie’s garden’s clay in particular, I’ll need to resolve what it is I want to say with this material, and before I get there, what it is about this material that speaks to me. A few of the tests above that speak of violence, destruction, and loss. Then, there are a couple that have a less brutal, more naturally cyclical element to them—somehow they are more accepting, or peaceful (if not hopeful).

I hope to be in a better place after this summer and to know with confidence where I want my focus to be in my practice, at least for this one show. To be honest though, I’m worried about how this year’s fire season will effect me. In the last little while, the weather’s been helping in my recovery from solastalgia, locally at least (and I’m trying to pay less attention to the news). Here in Regina, we’ve had a few good rain showers, and while the trees are still exhibiting signs of extreme distress, such as by dropping record numbers of seeds—a tree’s dying wish—in this present moment things are good and green. Right now, in the middle of this sixth mass extinction the world’s seen, there are so many birds singing in my backyard, and bees are constantly visiting my pollinator garden. This doesn’t mean I believe the problem is any less serious, it just means I’m privileged enough to live in this tiny oasis. Still, for my own well-being, this spring hasn’t been emotionally crippling as last year’s heat domes and forest fire smoke. (I just got gifted a pair of socks that announce to the world that I’m “a delicate fucking flower”). Others in the eco-stress support group I started feel similarly. Now, the task for us environmental-sensitives is to build up some resilience for the times when it doesn’t rain or it rains too much. Perhaps my show should be about that, an acknowledgement of our situation and a learning to live with it. I think that’s a task that many people are facing, and that many more will face in the coming years. I can see having a practice based on it.