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

Teaching and Workshop Practice

Ceramics 1 (2023-24)

In winter of 2023, I started teaching Ceramics 1, a foundational course designed to introduce art students to key handbuilding techniques in ceramics. The course focuses on instruction in pinch, coil, slab, and hollow forms, alongside essential finishing methods. While the primary goal is to develop strong practical skills through intensive studio practice, I also encourage students to consider wider significance of ceramics. Alongside mastering techniques, they are invited to reflect on how ceramics connects to broader artistic traditions and global ecological and cultural issues. This helps situate their learning within a larger context without detracting from the core focus on foundational skill-building.

In the same year (2023) at the academy, students of Art and Architecture, Institute for Art and Architecture, together with Prof. Michelle P. Howard, collected a large amount of soil excavated from the Vienna tube station construction site and used it to create an artistic installation. After the exhibition, a discussion between Prof. Michelle P. Howard and Prof. Julian Göethe (Departments of Art and Space I Object, Institute of Fine Arts, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), facilitated through Senior Lecturer / Head of Molding and Casting Techniques Workshop, Kristin Weissenberger, explored the possibility of giving this material a second artistic life. This idea extended into the ceramics course, and I was pleased to incorporate the excavated soil as both material and concept within a workshop setting.

Teaching Project Grant: Waste is Optional between Artistic Agency and Gaze (Workshop 2024)^25

Kristin Weissenberger, played a central role in shaping the workshop we delivered together. Kristin and I came together to design a workshop titled, Waste is optional: between Artistic Gaze and Agency, for ceramics 1 students, and we decided to apply for the annual teaching project grant at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.^26 As we began structuring the schedule and setting goals, we felt a tension between wanting to focus on essential technical skills and the deeper need to create space for critical reflection and meaningful dialogue. We were uncertain about how to balance these aims without overwhelming the students or losing sight of the creative process. Through open conversations with each other, we navigated these uncertainties together, deciding to expand the scope of the workshop to include ecological and conceptual dimensions alongside technique.

We framed our proposal around sustainable art practices as a foundation and used the notion of “waste” as a provocative tool to challenge assumptions about materials. We questioned what really counts as waste, refuse, or surplus, and how these ideas might open up new paths for inquiry and expression. The grant allowed us to gather materials for processing clay and reusing discarded substances for glazing, which felt both exciting and daunting; how to work ethically with what others discard, and what limitations or surprises might arise?

Inviting guest speakers like Christina Schou Christensen and Martin Kunze added layers of complexity and inspiration, showing us how clay can be a medium of research that connects ecology, speculative futures, and sustainability. Throughout, both Kristin and I were learning alongside the students, uncertain but committed to holding space for experimentation, discomfort, and reflection. This vulnerability, acknowledging what we didn’t fully know, became part of the workshop’s fabric and ultimately enriched the work we did together.

The workshop course’s parallel naming and evolution into the Sustainable Ceramics Group reflected a potential interest in collaborative, intersectional research with a focus on sustainable approaches to ceramics. However, I am uncertain whether this naming was the right decision, as it appeared to impose a focus on sustainability that didn’t necessarily emerge naturally from the students’ interests or practices. Despite this, we have continued to use the label, and I hope that over time it becomes more than just a greenwashing term; something that genuinely informs and enriches our practice for at least some of us.

The workshop progressively evolved beyond basic instruction of techniques, as students gained experience using both store-bought commercial clay and surplus clay excavated from Vienna’s subway construction. This clay that came bagged as tons of dried raw chunks to the Sculpture Studios has its own interesting parallel story.

We incorporated primitive pottery methods to wet process, sieve, and purify this wild/city dirt into workable clay. This meticulous and time-consuming technique grounded participants in a practice of slow, generative research, emphasizing the importance of patience and care in material preparation. The final project culminated in a collaborative sculpture forming a modular Landscape that could be fragmented, recombined, and expanded. This artwork evolved through the integration of edible components, including finger food brunch and bread sculptures fired in the kiln. Such experimentation cultivated relationality, grounded the practice in research, and positioned sustainability as a tangible, everyday artistic reality.

Throughout the course, questions about the necessity and consequences of making were foregrounded. Together, we asked whether every mark, every form, every fired object was essential, opening consideration for unfired ceramics, low firing, and the potential positioning of ceramics not only as artistic objects but also as technical devices or components within a larger system of production. This led to critical reflection on the potentially extractive nature of certain artistic practices and knowledge economies, contemplating approaches that may balance creativity with ecological consciousness.

Feedback loops developed organically: insights and outcomes generated by students and collective activities continually fed back into my own artistic research, enriching both teaching and personal work while participating in a culture of reciprocity and shared learning. The dynamic movement between individual art practice and group research supported ongoing innovation and iterative knowledge formation.

Artistically, this group’s project generated works that both embodied and disrupted our collective research. The main sculpture; a shared landscape, fragmented into autonomous units and continued to evolve, initially presented with food at the Sculpture Symposium, Red threads, loose ends, another sculpture is possible,as Open Lunch with Sustainable Ceramics and later revisited alongside bread sculptures baked in the ceramics kiln re-displaying the landscape sculpture under the title, ‘Home is a place that feels like baking’ at the annual Rundgang Exhibition 2025. Each stage expanded contexts of sculpture, research, sustainability, and relationality.

Ceramics 1 (2025)

Michel Serres reminds us that knowledge is never separate from its material circumstances; it flows and circulates, deeply entangled with the things themselves.^27 In 2025, despite the absence of a teaching grant, the course continued, benefitting from the open-source knowledge developed by last year’s group; a resource now accessible to all through collective research. There is no definitive conclusion to this inquiry; each new group, and anyone engaging with it through digital platforms and creative commons licensing, can extend and enrich the research in their own way. Like a network of roots, knowledge spreads, connecting, supporting, and growing beyond any single point of origin.

A field excursion to Wienerberg Park served as both methodological case study and affective anchor.^28 This former industrial site, now reimagined as public park, provided an opportunity to foreground the place-bound politics and histories of clay. Through situated, embodied inquiry, we moved through layers of sediment, labor, and memory.

Clay, in this context, emerged as a keything; simultaneously sediment and testimony, archive and agent, object and history. The workshop’s material practices: processing, sculpting, but also listening, tasting, collaborating, mirrored and unsettled cycles of extraction, value, and neglect, prompting new questions about the social role of art and the ethics of ecological or material engagement.

The group discussion unfolded as an ecology of observation, reflection, and tactile engagement. Victor Adler’s documentation of brickworkers’ conditions; long hours, minimal wages, child labor, overcrowded barracks, and the exploitative truck system, surfaced as spectral presences in the park.^29 . Students in the workshop later, handled the clay, transforming abstract knowledge of industrial oppression into embodied engagement.

The artistic outcome from students this year 2025 is developing as a collective exhibition on ‘Voices in Clay' (working title). This project emerged intuitively as students imagined bird forms and musical instruments for the common garden at the sculpture studios building. Through reflective conversations, the group continues to explore the ways these objects contribute voices; building presence and interaction within the garden context. As we plan to continue discussions and working on this project, we will focus on how these sculptural works generate voice, may or may not mark collective memory, and animate the space as part of a dynamic material parliament.

This exhibition practice directly continues previous workshop methods, emphasizing a deliberate rationing of materials and. Working with fragments, leftovers, and rejecting extractivist assumptions of endless supply, scarcity is reframed as both method and stance. At the same time, it is clear that artists must not bear burden alone to solve or directly reckon with social or environmental issues. Artistic practice is diverse: some engage consciously with these concerns, while others embrace emotional resonance, beauty, personal reflection, or other forms of expression. The idea of voices in clay embodies this multiplicity, through many points of entry with student contributions, it speaks in many registers: sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, often in the spaces between words. The act of making itself becomes voices, as a presence that invites gentle listening and engagement with the complexity of being.

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