It seems so obvious as to go without saying, but all of the materials used to make ceramics come from the surface of the earth.
This surface is always in motion, floating on a massive core of molten rock, minerals, granite, and iron. Cooling over billions of years, the hot center spews forth energy to the surface: volcanoes and earthquakes, building mountains and continents.
At the same time this surface is continually carved away by water and wind; our delicate, powerful, life sustaining atmosphere.
Living things also participate in this continual shaping of the earths skin: plant roots break apart rock, lichens decompose granite, and animals dig.
Humans – both the origin of the word and our material bodies come from humus, the latin word for soil or earth. Our bodies are made from the earths minerals, and and we use our bodies to dig. Humans extract minerals to build new mineral formations: pottery, buildings, cities and machines. We make digging machines from Iron, mined from the earth, and power these machines with petroleum – the remnants of ancient life – which is also excavated from the ground, an endless cycle of material extraction.
A continuous excavating machine digging for soda ash in an underground a mine in Wyoming
The Ceramic Materials Atlas works to tell the stories of a particular group of materials commonly used in studio ceramics. The oldest ceramic objects were made around 30,000 years ago, and since that time humans have been digging continuously, forming clay into statues, buildings, and pottery. For most of that history the clay used by potters would have come from within a few miles of the workshop, but at some time in the relatively recent past – probably around the time of the first industrial revolution – the scale of mining and extraction increased, and networks of railways, roads, and shipping made it increasingly cost effective to source ceramic materials from hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away. Today a typical Pottery studio uses materials from all corners of the continent and the globe. While many materials are mined domestically most American studios also import kaolin’s from Europe, Feldspars from as far away as India, and heavy metals used as colorants in glazes from China, India, Eastern Europe, and Africa.
Google earth image of the Greenbushes mine in Western Australia where some of the Lithium we use in the studio comes from the earth
The ceramic materials atlas began with a simple idea: to trace each of the materials we use in the pottery studio at Colorado State University back through the process of distribution and refinement to the places where they come from the ground. We hope these material stories create a sense of connection, a sense the even the apparently homogenous powders in the ceramics laboratory also come from the body of the earth. Like so many aspects of our lives, industrial ceramic materials are intertwined with global capitalism, but this does not mean that materials themselves are or have ever been unnatural. Our human relationship with ceramic materials reflects back to us the full range and capacity of our own human mineral bodies. We see both the violent scale and the ruthless precision of industrial extraction and material refinement, but also our capacity for endless curiosity, attention, and wonder towards the delicate intricacy of the material world. These materials and their stories – their origins from the depths our ever changing planet, the endless variation of their behavior when mixed and then heated in our kilns (an echo of the geologic processes at our planets core) and even the ways they have been uprooted from the earth – reveal a complex and wondrous nature. It is our hope that this project encourages an ethic of attention and care in ways that resonate out from the ceramic studio towards a more sensitive apprehension of the whole of our material world.