Keythings of Clay: Material Ecologies in Art and Pedagogy

ZM

This artistic research project investigates the ceramics workshop as a dynamic site at the convergence of art, pedagogy, and ecopolitics. Utilizing practice-based, iterative feedback loops, it explores how cycles of making, reflecting, and teaching with clay evolve concepts, methods, and material outcomes in an ongoing dialogue between agencies.^1 Clay is reimagined beyond a primitive arts and crafts medium as an infrastructural archive that embodies ecological, political, and urban narratives. Grounded in a material-ecological framework and informed by critical theory from Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, the project situates ceramics pedagogy within an experimental ecology of keythings; clay, tools, kilns, residues, and bodies, that co-constitute knowledge.^2 This research embraces contradictions and complexities of wicked ecological problems, fostering a pedagogy of “comfortable discomfort” that resists mastery and embraces provisionality.^3 The research unfolds over a time of wicked problems: war, speculated ecological collapse, institutional fragility, and the difficulty of knowing which crisis demands priority or whether these crises are in fact complicit in one another. Within this uncertainty, it is also considered how to navigate complexity with mindful presence, cultivating forms of practice that allow us to remain responsive without paralysis and eventually if this approach could be conducive to locate stable solutions and re-inject questions stemming from the practice back into practice and beyond.^4 Outcomes include pedagogical models and artistic works that demonstrate how material practices mediate relations between sustainability, ethical responsibility, and creative agency. Ultimately, the project envisions the ceramics studio as a vibrant, relational ecology that invites ongoing inquiry into the entangled systems constituting artistic research, practice and pedagogy.^5 ^1 Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2024). ^2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ^3 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016; Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ^4 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). ^5 Patricia Leavy, ed., Handbook of Arts-Based Research, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2025). Participants: Alevtina Lyapunova, Ana de Sousa Cardoso, Asya Marakulina, Bahareh Rahimi, Buket Özalevli, Carmen Kalata, Ebba Sofie Olsson, Esther Vörösmarty, Gloria Bergner, Heidi Noémi Ramskogler, Julia Stakhorska, Lili Marie Theilen, Luisali Theisen, Maria Milagros Ainchil, Olga Shapovalova, Oliwia Wioletta Kalwa, Prima Mathawabhan, Siha Kim, Tabea Briggs, Tim Morris Schiffer, Yeonkyeong Park together with Kristin Weissenberger and Zahra Mirza

Theoretical Framework

This project is situated within the field of artistic research, understood as a distinct and generative form of knowledge-making grounded in experience and practice. Following Patricia Leavy, artistic research resists reducing art to illustration or case study, instead positioning creative processes as rigorous inquiry capable of articulating complexities of lived experience, sociopolitical realities, and material entanglements that conventional scientific or humanities methods often cannot address.^9

In tandem with material philosophy and ecological thought, clay emerges as an active participant in knowledge production rather than an inert medium. Building upon Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things,” the studio assembles clay, kilns, tools, food, bodies, and fire as collaborators in inquiry.^10 Karen Barad’s notion of intraaction reinforces that meaning and matter co-emerge through entangled processes.^11 Pedagogy is reframed as artistic research in the form of collective, embodied learning; attentive to material resistances and affordances.

Crucially, this project integrates pedagogical feedback models where teachers and students engage in iterative learning loops. This dialogic process, supported by extensive educational research, foregrounds reciprocal feedback as essential for deepening understanding and fostering agency.^12 Feedback is conceived not as top-down judgment but as an ongoing exchange in which students actively interpret, respond to, and generate feedback themselves. In this co-creative feedback loop, knowledge evolves dynamically through negotiation, reflection, and shared experimentation.

Ecological theorists Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton deepen the framework by challenging solutionist impulses and insisting on embracing contradictions and complexities intrinsic to ecological entanglement.^13 ^14 Haraway’s injunction to “stay with the trouble” and Morton’s concept of "dark ecology" support this artistic research stance, where contradictions serve as conditions of possibility rather than obstacles.

Anna Tsing’s conception of friction further illustrates how knowledge arises through uneven encounters, between surplus subway clay and commercial clay, institutional frameworks and student collectives, edible and sculptural forms, revealing artistic research as a site of unstable, affectively rich transformation.^15 As Patricia Leavy notes, this knowledge is experiential, emotional, and material.^16

By positioning clay as a “keything” in an ecology of practice, this project creates iterative feedback loops of making, teaching, and learning; anchored both materially and pedagogically. These loops resist hierarchies of knowing and foreground relationality, enabling artistic research to generate new epistemic spaces where knowledge lives simultaneously in material form, thought, and collective experience.

Tip

Tip

ZM - Keythings of Clay: Material Ecologies in Art and Pedagogy - 2025