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

Conclusive Thoughts

Woven throughout the project is a belief in the potential of artistic research. Leavy’s approach champions scholarship as accessible, affective, and publicly resonant, and our practices reiterated this principle.^42 In the ceramics studio, clay was both medium and interlocutor, embodying the ways in which matter, agency, and social process entwine.^43 Every outcome, whether edible, performative, archival, or ephemeral, returns to the practice as an open record: an invitation to further discourse, practice and critique.

No single object, sculpture, confectionary is an endpoint; each is a provocation to re-examine the relationships between making, knowledge, material care, and world.^44 This project situates clay as a material and conceptual hinge connecting artistic practice, pedagogy, and ecopolitics. It challenges dominant narratives of sustainability by focusing not on solutions but on material negotiation, relationality, and intraaction.^45 Clay is simultaneously primitive, speculative, infrastructural, and geopolitical. It records imagination, extraction, circulation, and labor, embodying the entanglement of artistic, ecological, economic, and political systems.^46

The research illustrates that artistic practice can act as a site for inhabiting wicked problems. War, ecological collapse, institutional constraints, and pedagogical imperatives are entangled; none can be prioritized without acknowledgment of complicity. The studio becomes a 'parliament of things', where clay, tools, kilns, bodies, food, and fire co-author knowledge.^47 These keythings provoke, resist, and destabilize, shaping research as much as it shapes them.

Rationed practice, scarcity, and working with residue foreground ethical responsibility in material use. This echoes Haraway’s call to 'stay with the trouble': learning to act responsibly within unavoidable systemic entanglements.^48 The work is a form of rehearsal for living within collapse: attentive, iterative, and materially grounded.

The artistic outcomes illustrate the inseparability of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic inquiry in contemporary artistic research.

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