Realised in collaboration with sunday morning EKWC, Wetering, and Asbeter Holding.
Graduation project for Design Academy Eindhoven
© Benedetta Pompili 2021.
The relative abundance of clay on earth overshadows its finite nature and the damages caused by its extraction. Starting from the conversation with the clay on the potter’s wheel and along the making process, the material research Conversing with Matter on the one hand explores the economic, social, and technical aspects entangled around the mining and the making. On the other, it proposes an alternative journey to making while minimising the countereffects of the extraction.
The material research starts with the investigation over the reclamation of clay from the local sludge of the river Maas. The employment of river clay has multiple sustainability aims. A gradual harvesting method allows the riverbanks to clean and regenerate, lowers the CO2 impact of the transportation, keeps the connections with regional colours, textures, and properties. River clay additionally urges to care for what goes dispersed into urban waters as clay absorbs and tracks the chemical contamination encompassing it, promoting a refamiliarisation with river bodies
The marbling with a common studio clay, a white stoneware from Germany, allowed for an easier application of the wild clay body, otherwise uneasy to manage. The conversations between and with these two clay bodies on the potter’s wheel materialises in an archive made of pots inspired by Jacoba jugs. Mirroring the nature of the two clays, Jacobas were traded from Germany, the origin of the stoneware, to the Netherlands, where the river clay came from. Due to shipwrecks, many Jacobas still lay down in the river bed. The inspiration from the archaeologic findings was thought as a way to tell the stories of the materials and highlight their geographical origins while crafting a shape to archive the process.
A potters’ saying suggests that, to start understanding the clay on the potter’s wheel, it is needed to throw at least one hundred pots. Hence, one hundred samples of conversations were led.
By collaborating with AC Minerals, a research centre treating asbestos-cement and turning it silica, the second part of the research explores the application of the by-prodcuct of the treatment of asbestos as a filler in the clay. This uncommon grog, thought of as such for the first time, strenghtens the body of the clay while reducing the quantity of material needed. It in fact can substitute the 50% of the amount of clay needed. The material research was materialised in a set of 450 wall tiles, configuring the architectural and insulating possibilities of the composition while in dialogue with the past uses of asbestos.