In conversation: Clay

Talking craft and history with Jennifer Lucy Allan

Scroll to the bottom for: US (Chautauqua) speaking dates • August’s True Stories Book Club

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Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on haberdashery sites. It washes over me a couple of times a year: this desire to make something with my hands instead of my brain. That might be because I’m now thigh-deep into the first draft of my new book. My brain is very tired. It’s pretty much screaming for mercy. I’m desperate to switch to a different mode.

I have always made things. I suspect a lot of people who read this newsletter make things too. I grew up sewing with my grandmother, and I still make all my own blinds and curtains. In my twenties I taught myself to knit, and then to crochet. Full disclosure: I’m terrible at both. I drop a lot of switches (and turn the air blue in the process) and I never finish anything. But I love it anyway, the feeling of rhythm as the rows increase, the pure relationship with texture and colour. It’s all about the process for me - or that’s what I tell myself.

But making has another benefit for me: it lets me explore creativity outside the bounds of my own practice, where the stakes are lower. For that reason, I’m always fascinated by other people’s creative practices. I love to understand the relationship that makers have with their materials, to delve into what drives them, to experience the ways they perceive the world.

That’s what gave me the idea for this new strand on The Clearing. Once a month - or thereabouts - I’ll be talking to a someone with a different creative practice to understand what makes them tick. I hope to draw out the threads of what motivates us all to create, and to articulate why it’s so important.

In this first interview, I speak to journalist and BBC Radio 3 presenter, Jennifer Lucy Allan about her practice as a potter, and her brilliant new book, Clay: A Human History.

Image: Paper Trident

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Hello! This is Katherine - Jennifer, I loved Clay: A Human History - it’s such a brilliant idea to talk about our entangled history with this material. When did you start working on the book?

I guess I started thinking about it when I first started pottery classes about nine or 10 years ago - I was totally in thrall to this material, and I wanted to read more about people working with it, the histories of its forms and uses. I found a few books, but I was surprised there wasn't a really engaging non fiction book that really scratched my itch. I did some reading on my own, and over the course of a few years, tinkered with a pitch, which I finally had time to dig into after my book The Foghorn’s Lament came out.

So was clay a way to relax before then? I wondered if writing the book changed your relationship with it.

Yes totally! When I started I was doing a PhD and it was a way to do something with my hands that didn't involve a screen. I needed something totally differently stimulating after days with my head in books. In terms of my relationship with it, it occupies a place in my life now where I'm not actually sure where to go - I have some skills, I know a lot about its history, but I'm not actually sure what I want from it in the long term. I don't want to be a potter running an independent business - it's tough!

Yep I know a lot of potters and I don’t think it’s an easy career! But there is something very soothing about handling clay - somatically. It’s deeply calming.

When it goes right definitely! I think finding it calming or not has something to do with the relationship between the way you imagine what you want to make, and your ability to manifest that with your hands. I got interested in thinking about muscle memory as a way of knowing something.

So a kind of intelligence without words? Embodied knowledge?

In some cases yes - I thought a lot about tacit knowledge especially as it refers to learning how to throw on the wheel. So many instructional books seemed to be throwing up their hands to say “well we can explain this process but it won't be much use in words”. It's the pottery version of Michael Polanyi talking about how you can ride a bike without being able to describe the actual physics that are keeping you upright and moving.

It’s so true - I think we often want to skip the slow, repetitive learning that something like pottery requires. It doesn’t belong in the world of words!

Mistakes seem like an important part of the process - or maybe chance? I’m thinking about your interviewee Charly.

I love Charly's work so much, it has such solid presence yet is often so friable, the way she produces surfaces is amazing. There's a maxim in pottery glazing: one potters glaze fault is another's special effect

I love that!

Chance does come into it in lots of cases - glazing and firing is often talked of as alchemical for that element of unpredictability. I love that aspect, and of how elemental these processes are - it all comes down to earth, fire, air and water.

But she’s also willing to let her pots break in the process - that’s a pretty stirring metaphor of the power of being a creator. I was interested to see how many religions/cultures had humans being formed from clay in their creation myth. Can you talk about that a bit?

I began writing about clay in origin stories - we know some of them, from the Bible or the Qur'an, but there are so many more - the Ainu in Japan, a Yoruba story, Prometheus... I had to leave a lot out so it didn't end up just publishing a list!

It really blew my mind to see just how many there were. On the one hand it makes sense that this abundant, mouldable material might figure in the first stories we tell about ourselves, but on the other it made me think again about the clay in my hand - how many people have held and moulded clay and told stories about it.

Yes! And it made me think about the relationship between humans and the earth - the sense that we’re formed from/by the landscape.

That's a really interesting aspect to those stories - many of them feature us coming to life with the addition of life or consciousness or a soul, which comes from the breath of a god, their spit, or their blood. Interestingly, the Popol Vuh, a Mayan sacred text, is one where it doesn't work - attempts are made to make humans from all kinds of materials that fail, clay being one of them.

It seems like clay was an important part of our actual evolution.

Well, that's debatable, but there are theories involving clay. Many of them centre on the idea that clay might have provided the material on which material could gather and eventually form a cell, or that mineral evolution played a part.

I read the other day that frogs evolved in puddles that formed in dinosaur footprints! I want that to be true.

Wow! My favourite plants are ferns - not just because they are difficult to kill but because they're basically dinosaurs.

You write about the clay goddess figures that seemed to abound in our deep past - it seems like clay has been important in our worship.

In so many ways! We can't really know much about these figurines, about what they were used for - they have an immense power on our imaginations because of that I think. I loved reading about Marija Gimbutas' work around Old Europe and the figurines she wrote about. She was drawn to these figurines too, and created this pantheon she described in detail. whether she was right or not was less interesting to me than the ways they reflected our own values back at us - the same is true of the erotic Moche pottery I write about in the chapter on death.

Yes, tell us a bit about Moche pottery.

The Moche (a South American society, who lived along the coast of what is now Peru) made a lot of really horny pottery! Often moulded stirrup vessels in the shape of people having sex of various kinds, figures and skeletons with phalluses - quite the pantheon of forms. I guess there's something taboo or erotic about them that drew me to them, but they just reset any ideas you might have about "traditional" or "ancient" pottery. They're comic book in some ways, but had some relationship to death.

And how old are they?

The Moche were around I think about 100-800CE. They used moulds for their pottery, and the pieces are so expressive - sometimes they feel incredibly modern. The Moche left no writing culture, so we have no idea why they might have left these pots with their dead.

I think what I really learned from your book was just how thoroughly clay is woven through human history - we have such a profound relationship with it, to the extent that we barely notice it. For example, we eat off it every day.

Totally - I was never lost for ideas of what this material meant to us, because it can be so many different things. I like the idea that even if we just make a simple form, there's something in the fact we are moulding clay that connects us to those origin stories - I think about that whenever I'm at the pottery studio now. The timelines that stretch out behind us when we form something are mind blowing, totally magical. It's those ideas I get caught up in, because they re-enchant the world around us.

It’s a lovely way to make a connection. What are you working on at the moment? Have you tried any more clay from skips? I’m pretty sure the clay in my garden would make a good pot!

You should try it! In terms of work, in the studio I'm making lots of figurines, based on Mycenaean figurines, that I'll do something with around the launch of the book, and I've also gone back to the wheel again, making some large mugs from a speckled clay. I've also got a very big coil-built bowl on the go that is actually intended to be planted up with this big frilly blue fern.

Writing wise I'm just finishing up the text for a collaborative zine I'm working on with an old friend and amazing designer up in Manchester who operates in a duo called DR.ME. Over the course of writing the book I kept running into sound and music when I was looking for clay! so I collected some of the ephemera and have interviewed some artists and musicians, which will be a little sister publication to the main book.

That sounds wonderful!

it's partly an attempt to connect my music writing with this writing about clay and ceramics, to try and understand the connections for myself, and a way of doing something with all this ephemera which will pay tribute to my love of archives.

I often think that books leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs that you need to keep on following! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about Clay.

Thanks to you!

Clay by Jennifer Lucy Allan is published by Hachette.

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Katherine’s next live appearance:

USA: Friday 9th August: Chautauqua Institution, NY, speaking as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series. Details here.

Your next live event:

Tuesday 27th August: True Stories Book Club with Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence. The Book Club will be at 6pm UK/1pm ET/10am PT. We’ll publish a reading guide and link soon.

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