Slab works made by my mom in college, David MacDonald’s work that my parents acquired, and clay in liturgical metaphors were my first encounters with clay. All of these childhood references instilled the knowledge that clay starts out amorphous but can be shaped and molded by a hand and possibly added tools. It needs to be acted upon in order to reveal its beauty. As a twentysomething Boston transplant, my first full-time job was as a museum fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. My work there centered on a solo show of Simone Leigh’s work (opening April 6, 2023) and her presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2022. From there, I took a wheel-throwing class at Harvard University to understand more about Leigh’s medium and her use of the vessel for how she cites unrecognized feminized and racialized labor.
What I learned while centering the clay and obsessing over the clay-to-water ratio in class for weeks is that clay particles are like platelets; water and earth dance around and are compressed in the process of sculpting. While the goal is cohesion, it starts as a suspension. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not to oversimplify it, is in suspension, as it is multiple different ideologies pulling apart rather than binding together. I learned this profound lesson from Simone Leigh’s "Jug" (2014). As an outlier in her practice, because it is unfired and has a much subtler nod to anthropomorphic forms compared to other works, it marries the meaning with the form. "Jug" communicates the division of race, labor, and gender through the use of Lizella Clay, vessel form, unfired clay constantly subject to its environment, and thumbprint adornment. Perhaps the concept within this outlier piece means that both clay and humanity are ever-changing and morph into new iterations of division or that it can be solved.
