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

Future Directions

Futures direction in researching material ecologies within art practice and pedagogy could benefit from a living, breathing feedback loop where knowledge created and shared continuously feeds into new learning objectives and environments, keeping research a dynamic, evolving method rather than a fixed endpoint.^49

In this ecosystem, clay reveals itself as more than material: a political and infrastructural medium; keything, charged with histories of extraction, labor, and urban metabolism.^50 Working with clay invites direct engagement with the complex ecological, economic, and geopolitical systems shaping contemporary life.

Pedagogy practiced with an ecological gaze becomes a space of cohabitation with contradiction. In the ceramics workshop, artists, clay, kilns, food, tools, bodies, residues, co-create knowledge.^51 Instruction unfolds into negotiation; making is inseparable from reflecting on the conditions that enable it. The workshop functions as a research ecology where contradictions are rehearsed, fueling ongoing inquiry.

This awareness could extend to the delicate balance between reclaimed and commercial materials. Neither rejected nor privileged, both are situated within their broader supply chains; mined, processed, packaged, transported and revealing infrastructures invisible in the studio yet carrying profound ecological and political consequences. Working with surplus clay alongside commercial products cultivates material literacy; a recognition that every object carries a past and projects futures of waste, reuse, or disappearance.^52

Future directions invite expanding keythings mapping across materials and other agencies; exploring institutional ecologies that nurture sustainable, experimental practice; investigating edible material artistic practices; developing rationing as an artistic strategy of scarcity; and designing pedagogy that embraces uncertainty, complexity, and systemic entanglement.

Taken together, these approaches expose the inseparability of art, pedagogy, and ecopolitics through material attentiveness, co-presence, and intra-action. Clay emerges as interlocutor, collaborator, and provocateur, modeling ethical, embodied, speculative engagement in an uncertain world; a template for artistic research as a living, responsive process.^53

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