Clay Commons

The Clay Commons Podcast is so excited to offer this episode with Adebunmi Gbadebo (Ah Day Boo mi, Bha Day Bo), fresh from her successes at the Venice Biennale. Her practice is as a multidisciplinary artist working with paper, ceramics, sound, and film, exploring the archival record of her family’s ancestry in Nigeria and enslavement in USA. Through her research, material selection, and technical process, the artist emphasizes the prejudice of the historical record, activating her practice to restore Black subjectivity. 

This is an unbelievably generous and inspiring conversation and approach to the conceptual and restorative use of foraged materials within ceramic practice rooted in experimentation, reimagining indigenous craft and uncovering ancient narratives embedded in the making of utilitarian objects. 

This episode also marks the launch of our official membership programming! These podcast episodes will now come with exclusive membership opportunities for our members to meet our guests and each other during online seminars. Do check out our website for information about how to sign up and book onto what I’m sure will be an incredibly enriching and inspiring addition to this episode. 

The next four episodes loosely revolve around the idea of Sustainability, looking at this zeitgeist topic through the lens of conceptual art practice and reparative land processes with Adebunmi, before moving onto ideas of sustainability as they manifest within community, research and studio.

https://adebunmi.carbonmade.com/ 

@adebooms

I’m so grateful to be able to share this conversation with our final board member, Oren Shoesmith. 

Oren is a Cornish artist and writer living in Scotland. He works in an entangled way between clay, poetry, performance and film and his practice centres around unruly lands and bodies, finding paths of liberation through boglands, claylands and gender borders. Currently his research is focused on industrial histories of extraction, land dispossession, and re-imagining devotional earth-based practices.

Oren brings an embedded connection to clay which offers an invitation to explore and connect to a form of material spirituality that I feel is often missing from our contemporary lives and which I find deeply nourishing. I can’t wait for you to share his wisdom and thoughts through this conversation. 

https://www.orenshoesmith.co.uk

@orenshoesmith

I'm thrilled to introduce my long-time friend and critical craft and community guide, Simeon Feathertstone, who's a repeat offender at The Clay Commons and has been a guiding voice since its inception.

Simeon is currently Associate Lecturer, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, & Curriculum Lead for Ceramics at Morley College, and he also has a long established career as the co-founder of Parasite Ceramics an organisation that primarily produces collaborative public clay projects that focus on promoting community values, co-creative partnerships and sense of identity. Both with Parasite ceramics and as an artists-facilitator in his own right, Simeon has created numerous ceramic artworks and public realm projects throughout the UK though national and local organisations for diverse audiences and communities.

We got into it during this conversation discussing how to navigate formal and informal spaces of learning, the social value of clay and material knowledge and how we pass on that knowledge maker to maker.  

https://simeonfeatherstone.co.uk

@simeonfeatherstone

This time we’re meeting the wonderful Carla Wright, an artist working in ceramic sculpture, sound and wall-based works that explore community architecture and shared spaces of gathering. She also runs her own community interest company and ceramic studio in Bexhill-on-sea in south England is called Common Clay, so we’re closely linked by name as well as practice! We’re both deeply invested in clay as both an artistic material and a means of connection and commonality and I’m thrilled to have her understanding and care behind The Clay Commons. This conversation is a rich dive into what it means to run accessible ceramic spaces that cut across class and physical barriers, practical musings on how we pay ourselves as artists and facilitators and even a bit about tuning into clay time and embracing slowness.

https://carlawright.co.uk/

https://commonclay.co.uk/

@common.clay

@_carlawright

We're starting Season Three with four episodes introducing our Non-Executive Board at The Clay Commons, four amazing artists working across a broad spectrum of clay and ceramic practice: Isis Dove Edwin, Carla Wright, Simeon Featherstone, and Oren Shoesmith. The Clay Commons is a communal effort and I'm so grateful to our board for helping guide us and am excited to give our listeners more context and lived experience as to why we started this journey and what we hope to achieve.

We’re starting with Isis Dove-Edwin, a wonderful artist who came to clay as a second career and has developed a practice of sculptural vessels that explores clay as a material of agency, power and resistance for people across the Black African diaspora, alongside a collaborative practice with artist Leonora Lockhart, called 2nd Shift, which is researching and creating opportunities around being an artist-mother. We had a wonderfully enriching conversation about the challenges and inspirations of bring an being an artist mother, matrilineal knowledge, and non-linear journeys into clay. 

https://ideceramics.com/about-1

@isisdoveedwin

@the_2nd_shift

We're back! 

The Clay Commons Podcast is back and relaunching Season Three with a new look, new guests, new format and a new membership at www.theclaycommons.org. In this episode, our host Eva Masterman reintroduces the concepts, practices and communities behind The Clay Commons and lays the ground for our future plans. 

The Clay Commons Podcast is an entry point to a new membership programme and community supporting the development of ceramic learning, engagement and practice across an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse landscape. We've got some amazing conversations lined up that provide a space to exchange knowledge and resources on current issues, build relationships and collaborations, grow audiences and solve challenges with peers.

Join us to explore the why, where and with whom of clay practice and join a growing clay community that is working towards a thriving, clay-centered future.

Until next time! This is a beginning, a jumping off point, a carrion cry to all those interested in clay as a force for good. Keep following, keep listening, lots more to come.

@clay.commons

I'll let this one stand on its own - a little something from my current phd, to end on an intent for the future.  

To You and Clay and Beyond.

VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN! Let’s end with a bit of hope and imagine together what we might build together. If we start to shift our creativity towards communities and away from capitalism. It’s a long road ahead, but we’ve got to start somewhere! 

 In this final episode, we talk about the importance of spaces to gather and talk about ideas. There’s lots wrong with universities, but they did give us a space to get together and talk about things that we cared about, deeply, over time. How many other places in society can we do this? Clay studios, that’s where! 

Let’s face it, zoom isn’t going anywhere, but the importance of face to face organising cannot be forgotten. Holding spaces for community and discussion is even more important as our governments come for drag story time and police our reading lists. How we might start to create these spaces with values at their core, where we start to practice ways that challenge capitalism and the capitalistic ideas of extraction and exhaustion and individualism that we’ve been indoctrinated into? Definitely not tying myself to Marx, but he did suggest that as capitalism emerges as a failed economic system, the failed state would erupt into violence. He also said that we must go through capitalism to get to the other side, and that this violence would be an indicator that capitalism was in its death throws. …Seen any violence lately?

At a point when it feels like a kind of Russian roulette as to which will do us in first, war or climate catastrophe, surely it’s time to start imaging and enacting what might be on the other side? 

 Contributors:

David Raileanu, director of Red Ink Community Library  https://www.redinkri.org/thestory

Liz Welch, director and founder of Anyhow Studio https://www.anyhowstudioprovidence.com/

Clay Commons was written and produced by Eva Masterman, editing supported by Travis Roush. This podcast was supported by Newcastle University, and the Northern Bridge AHRC Consortium. Artwork created by Kelly Jade

Audio credits:

-       "Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

-       "Ambience, Seaside Waves, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

Episode 4 is about positioning this work within traditional practices and rooting it in grassroot, activist, community organising. Speaking to Les Monarcas de Barro (the butterflies of mud), this amazing organisation talks to me about immigration, South American pueblo ceramic traditions, and the disconnect between ideas of land and earth, and our Western understanding of ceramics. 

So many of our studios and clay practices have been built around handbuilding 1, handbuilding 2, with a focus on skill devoid of context, spirituality or even general connection to each other. How many of us have entered a studio and worked without taking off our headphones, barely speaking to the others around us? I’m all for a bit of alone time, but this compelling episode talks about the importance of not working and living in a silo, to move beyond individualism and towards the collective. We also talk about the importance of getting clay and traditional making back into the hands of people who’ve been severed from their lands and histories, to make small steps towards bringing back a connection that has been taken from them. 

This episode is about trying to make change wherever you can, and starting to view clay as not just handbuilding 1, handbuilding 2, but as a way of understanding ourselves, where we come from, and who we want to be.

 Contributors:

Vanessa Cabezas and Kevin Escobar, founders of Les Monracas de Barro https://www.facebook.com/LesMonarcasdeBarro/

Clay Commons was written and produced by Eva Masterman, editing supported by Travis Roush. This podcast was supported by Newcastle University, and the Northern Bridge AHRC Consortium. Artwork created by Kelly Jade

Audio credits:

-       "Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

-       "Ambience, Seaside Waves, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

-       Music in the background of this episode are clips from indigenous street performers in Mexico City and a street festival in Oaxaca City from my travels in 2022.