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

Feedback Loops and Pedagogical Reflections

Conversations in the studio inspired me to develop and share methods of rationing practice and production without judgment, and with reinforced commitment to informed, mindful decision-making.^30 Together with students, we explored the questions of whether every mark etched into clay or every sculpted object needs firing, and how unfired or low-fired ceramics might hold valuable space within artistic practice. We thought of ways to expand our understanding of ceramics beyond making pleasing objects for display or use, considering the medium’s expanded potential as industrial devices or architectural components, thus prompting critical inquiry into the material’s multiple functions, significances and future potentials.

Such investigations also led us to discuss if the difficulty lies in the use of materials in general for artists and art students. When discussing the extraction not only of physical resources but also of knowledge and disciplinary capital, we acknowledged that few practices engaged in producing material or conceptual outcomes, are exempt from extractive or transactional aspects. And this ought not to bring guilt or shame but rather a mindful approach to decision making. Throughout this process, Timothy Morton’s concept of "dark ecology" was a vital touchstone for me.^31 It guided me towards embracing the inseparability of life, matter, and destruction; attending deeply to entanglements while resisting illusions of control or mastery.^32 At times, I learned that my own artworks and those emerging from student collaborations became part of these interwoven cycles of complicity, influence and reciprocity.^33 Refusing closure, these moments of creative friction, as Anna Tsing describes, were where new knowledge/s emerged: through encounters, disruptions, and uneven entanglements rather than linear transmissions.^34

Drawing from my time in the workshop, I’m fully aware that “inspiration” often acts as a convenient label for extractive impulses, where ideas and materials just flow one way, leaving behind an uneven exchange.^35 What I’m aiming for instead is a feedback loop, a kind of creative circuitry where work sparked by the students loops back, feeding their future practices and conversations.^36 It’s not about taking, but about generating ongoing gestures of reciprocity that keep evolving within our shared ecosystem.

Using leftover clays, bits sourced from the city or grabbed from workshop remnants, I built book sculptures with fragmented alphabets. One of these pieces made it to the Academy Auction, a conscious act of giving back, made with academy materials but distinctly carrying layered meanings.

These Book-sculptures emerged from the residues of studio labor: fragments of leftover clay, slips, sieved particles, alphabet fragments. Words, letters, and text were embedded with specific codes and yet as unreadable in conventional sense, legible to touch, spatial perception, and material understanding. Here, Barad’s notion of intra-action is tangible: text and material, body and clay, knowledge and labor are entangled in inseparable relation.^37

The students’ bread sculptures that were created together with Kristin Weissenberger, as edible co participants of the collective sculpture, Landscape reorganizing once again for the annual Rundgang exhibition, Home is a place that feels like baking, in their own right, later ignited my series of Palimpsests, surfaces for baking and serving confectionaries. The bisque fired porous Palimpsests are interacted with during book readings. Reading them means tasting chemistry, witnessing accumulation, sensing fragility and contemplating collapsology. Reading them also means confronting what is left after the sweet consumption.In cookies and parathas, as with other foods where reducing sugars combine with certain amino acids, the color and the aroma is peculiarly interesting. What we crave is the Maillard Reaction.^38 These sugars meet amino acids, molecules rearrange, break, recombine. Some compounds brown food, others rise as aroma, promising comfort before the first bite. But heat also creates acrylamide, a toxic byproduct of the Maillard Reaction.^39 By bringing these works into book readings with the students, I aim to offer a space for reflection and further conversation, inviting them to engage deeply with these interwoven themes of materiality, comfort, risk, and transformation.

Through this messy, nonlinear exchange, I want to cultivate a practice where teaching, making, and reflecting saturate each other; where inspiration is less about ownership and more about circulation, connection, and nourishing the complex flows of collective creativity.

Reflecting on this ongoing research, it becomes clear that the project is less about arriving at answers and more about dwelling within complexity as an unfinished conversation where feedback loops of making, reflecting, and learning continuously intertwine with the ethical and ecological questions we face.

Sustainability in art practice challenges easy definitions or greenwashed slogans. I witnessed how students often felt unsettled by these tensions, caught between grappling with ethical responsibility and navigating an art world demanding relentless productivity and portfolio building. The creation of the Sustainable Ceramics Group was never about crafting a definitive ethical project. Rather, it served as a space where sustainability and climate discourse could be integrated into practice without sidelining the creative impulse or becoming a burden.

During the workshop, pedagogy for me was always an assertion of co-presence; a negotiation of attention, time, labor, and materiality. Collective learning emerged through material engagement, through touch, repetition, failure, and the patient observation of process. The affective atmosphere was one of comfortable discomfort, a shared space where contradictions lived side by side: clay as resource, art as practice and inquiry, teaching as instruction and mutual discovery.

Theoretical insights from Anna Tsing helped me see this pedagogy as emergent and relational, shaped by the friction between a multitude of agencies and keythings in the studio.^40 As students learned to read clay as more than material; as index, archive, and agent within systemic ecologies, they also encountered material constraints that could not be mastered simply through skill or intention, enacting Karen Barad’s idea of intra-action, where knowledge and matter co-emerge inseparably.^41

Interdisciplinary perspectives expanded this inquiry, with scientific, ecological, and technological voices provoking deeper reflection. Clay became a lens onto geopolitics, extractivism, and relationality, unveiling how everyday studio practices are embedded within expansive global networks of energy, labor, and consequence but also that ceramics is not just an art and craft material; we have ceramics components in our mobile phones and other devices, infrastructures etc.

In this light, pedagogy for me became less about transmitting skills and more about aiming to cultivate a research ecology as shared ground for experimentation, negotiation, and reflection, where students and I enter feedback loops that acknowledge complexity without demanding premature resolution. Care, attentiveness, and ethical responsiveness emerge as vital materials of practice, attuned to a world that is never neatly circumscribed but always in flux.

This reflection invites ongoing questioning and openness, recognizing that the work of sustainability in and alongside art is never complete but always a practice of becoming with.

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