Country: a love letter
In the time of the pandemic — after the time of the bushfires — I relocated to the country for a few months in the middle of winter, alone. I was staying on Dja Dja Wurrung country. Upside-down country. It’s country that has been profoundly altered over the past couple of hundred years by waves of miners, farmers, and creeping tides of urban settlement. The grazing of sheep and other farming practices have caused compaction of the soil, erosion, salinity, and the loss of biodiversity over large parts of the landscape. There are places where it seems no stone has been left unturned. It is a harsh, dry, rocky country that I love.
The shift provided an unexpected opportunity for me to interrogate what I do as a potter from a new standpoint. This was not about making. And it gave me space to question what a potter is — and what a potter knows — outside of the studio environment and the usual processes of creating with clay. Disruption can be a good thing when it feels like the world needs shaking up. The unfolding of events over the past couple of years — and the slowly dawning realisation that we are not headed for, but are living in, a time of mass extinction—was leaving me with an uneasy relationship to the objects that I was making. It is hard to argue the need for another cup in a world where many of us are drowning in possessions.
Furthermore, I realised that I didn’t properly know the materials I’d been working with. I knew some of what they could do for me, and some of how to use them, but I didn’t know where they came from. I didn’t know who they were when they were at home. I could have literally fallen over a chunk of feldspar without recognising it. My ignorance meant that I wasn’t able to take sufficient responsibility for making decisions in the studio. If there was a choice between a material that had been shipped halfway around the world and a substitute that was mined an hour or two out of town, I wasn’t aware of it. I started to think about the provenance of my materials.
There is a passage in Robert MacFarlane’s beautiful book Underland: A Deep Time Journey where he is discussing the work of academic and author Stephen Graham,
‘We find it hard to escape the ‘resolutely flat perspectives’ to which we have become habituated,..........and [Graham] finds this to be a political failure as well as a perceptual one, for it disinclines us to attend to the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal that support the surface world.’
And reading it I think — yes — we need to look at these networks; we need to weave them into our understanding of the world.
We are often tempted to look for quick answers when faced with complex questions. I could research the origins of the materials that I use in my studio, make more informed decisions, share this information with others and continue with business as usual. But business as usual no longer feels like an option and the questions keep piling up. Does my cobalt come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo? What goes on in the mines there ?What are the politics of extractivism?
What — actually — is clay?
I decide to meet some of this matter on its own ground. (I am like the urban kid who needs to be shown where a potato grows so that she will know that a packet of chips contains plants.) I start trying to read geology and now there’s a whole new language to play with. And it begins to dawn on me that, as potters, we are always dealing with geological change. We are unmaking and making rocks. We are constantly dealing with situations where we have to recognise that we are not in charge of time. We wait patiently (or impatiently) for pots to harden for trimming, to dry for firing. To fire. We are in the hands of a sort of tame geological time. Marcia Bjornerud in her book Timefulness: How Thinking like a Geologist Can Help Save the World argues that regaining a sense of the deep time of geology gives us a perspective that can help us make better decisions about how we behave in the now, for the future. That can help us become what immunologist Jonas Salk would call ‘good ancestors’. We don’t talk enough about ancestors, the ones we have, the ones we will be. Provenance.
This course of inquiry that I have embarked on is filling a space that my teaching and making practice would usually take up. It has a different shape though, and it has generated conversations and connections that are new and that feel important. Thinking and being with others is important to me too. So back in Naarm, my city of Melbourne; I gather a little band of associates together and start to plan an outing, back up to Dja Dja Wurrung country to fossick through the leftovers of miners and the scars of settlement. We want to meet some rocks.
A miner’s right is simple to acquire, five minutes online and the legalities are taken care of. The questions raised when I think about bringing some of these rocks home with me to study are harder to grapple with. I send an email to the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation telling them that I am intending to collect some clay and rocks in order to understand them and their origins better. I ask if there is anybody who would be available for a conversation; to give me their perspective on my plan and generally on the use of resources from their traditional lands. I am not surprised when I get no reply, I am aware that they will have bigger issues and more important work to attend to than my little excursion and my itchy settler conscience. It would be good to have this conversation — I am thinking about provenance and responsibility after all — but we will be careful and respectful.
My relationship to this land that we inhabit is necessarily difficult. When I think about what acknowledgment of country means to me there are two intertwining threads. First, there is the sorry business of colonisation; the need to acknowledge the damage done to Australia’s first peoples. No pretty statement will set this matter to rest — I am beyond believing in easy answers — but ‘staying with the trouble’ to use Donna Haraway’s phrase makes sense to me. Engaging in dialogue and most of all listening. It’s problematic having a background, a provenance, of colonialism but I sit with the discomfort; it’s a useful feeling.
To complicate matters, I am aware that these are not just local issues. Most of the resources that we use in our ‘surface lives’ have difficult provenances. The sacks of materials that sit on my studio shelves have been mined from places all over the globe, but what they have in common is that they come out of a global economic system that exploits labour and resources, and that disrupts the relationship between people and their world. What Marx called a metabolic rift (There are numerous ways of talking about this alienation between humans and nature but the word metabolic with its implications of interdependent and dynamic processes appeals). We have been cast adrift and a ‘not in my backyard’ approach is not enough.
The second thread of acknowledgment of country for me is about relationship to country itself. I am here, but I don’t know the place well enough and I don’t feel I belong (looking up the etymology of ‘belong’ I find... Middle English be- + longen ‘to be fitting, be suitable’). A friend told me once about being present at a Welcome to Country conducted by Dennis McDermott, a Koori psychologist, academic, and poet; in which he — a newcomer to Naarm — talked about the winds and airs of my city, comparing them to other places he had known. The story has stayed with me because I have lived here my entire life and I don’t know these things, I haven’t been paying attention.
In the new year, we head out bush, our little troupe of novice rockhounds, and the first item on our list is sustenance. Because eating together is good and it’s important, everyone has brought good food to share. We dig up some clay from a nearby dam, grab a bale of straw from a roadside stall, and start building a little clay oven inside our fire circle. That night, in the oven we cook trout wrapped in corn husks (we’ve forgotten the paperbark) and clay. Sweet potatoes are turned into perfect little clay sculptures and cooked in the coals. And then — to borrow a line from Tara June Winch’s book The Yield — 'we talked about the little things that are big things.’
The next day we travel to a place where our research suggests we may find some metallic oxides. Manganese, possibly traces of copper, maybe even cobalt. Always iron. We have chosen a site where mining has taken place and the country is already jumbled, and this eases our minds a bit. We’re not going to be making things much worse. We wander along a dried-up creek bed, looking into the strata of the walls and down at our feet. The hidden structures of the earth are laid open to us and although we don’t really know what we are looking at—or looking for—we are totally entranced. Things start to settle into patterns that we can read, and we find some dark metallic matter that we name Black Cat.
We still have another day, and we fossick around the outskirts of a kaolin mine and then into a long-abandoned iron mine, immersed in the history and falling for the rocks. (Incidentally, iron ore is just a rock with enough iron in it to make it profitable to extract. Language of use.) The lines between rocks and metal are dissolving and so are the distinctions between disciplines; we are thinking like chemists, geologists, physicists, and potters.
Back home again we discuss and admire these pieces of upside-down country that we have collected. We take portraits of some favourites. Rather than seeing them only in terms of their usefulness to us, we are starting to see them as fascinating and beautiful characters. They are endearing themselves to us. We want to right them and we want to do right by them.
Later in January, The Provenance Project begins a residency in a shopfront in Brunswick that is run by a group called Study.
Study is a collective effort. As a site of speculative practice that generates new ways of being together, no one act, action or activity in itself should define Study. Rather, it will articulate itself in the way we free ourselves from current constraints and modes of being. That is all to say, we hope it will get capitalism out of our bones. ⸺ from ‘Study Manifesto’, Ender Baskan, Sophie Moorhouse Morris, and the Study Committee.
Study is a beautiful idea and it is also a physical space with wonderful light and air. It gives the project an opportunity to grow in another way. We set up a small library, a little test kiln, work-tables, tools, and our materials. There are people passing by, coming in and out.
The rocks are our ground, they anchor the conversations that are generated here. People come and make poetry and drawings for, and of, them. We deconstruct some of them in the way that potters do, separating, crushing, and recombining them. Putting them through the kiln and waiting impatiently to see how they have altered after the passage of fire. As potters do. We elicit a cobalt response with our testing and we are beyond excited, we call it Baby Blue.
But we’re also talking to people who have different epistemologies. People who are studying the ethics of our materials; writing on the relationship between poetry and mining; talking about the technology of soil analysis, and about the way their blood feels when it meets iron. And our relationship to the materials is different too. They don’t belong to us, but we do belong to the world , after all as Robert MacFarlane says
We are part mineral beings too — our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones — and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land.
And I am looking straight into Marx’s metabolic rift and thinking about sutras and sutures. Thinking about country and love.
Published in The Journal of Australian Ceramics, issue 601, April 2021