On Monday, Sept. 9, Elias Griffin ’20 presented
The Land Beneath My Feet: An Exploration of Upstate New York through Ceramics
in the Kennedy Center for Theatre and Studio Arts. The exhibit debuted Griffin’s sculptures and research from his Emerson Summer Collaborative Research Grant with Professor of Art Rebecca Murtaugh.
Griffin gave the following description of his work: “By using clay bodies that I dug from surrounding areas to create ceramic sculptures, I wanted to engage in the geologic past and future of upstate New York as a reflection on growing up in New York City. The project was an attempt to understand the ever-morphing cultural significance, the movement, and the violence of growing up in the city, yet its disjointed relationship to the natural world.”
Over the course of the 10-week project, Griffin spent 6 weeks solely exploring the underlying properties of upstate New York’s geology, specifically the types of clay found in the soil and the processes that created them. According to Griffin: “It was about 3 weeks before I even had any sizeable quantity of working clay, and a fair amount of unsuccessful searching before I found any effective clay source. The first source came from the glen.
“After a rainstorm, I followed stream runoffs in Kirkland Glen until I found places where the water had cut enough of the soil away to reveal clay earth underneath. This would’ve been difficult to transport clay from, and I think I might’ve run into issues with Hamilton people if I tried to dig up buckets of clay.
“The second source of clay came from the word of Geology Professors Kat Beck and Todd Rayne, who pointed me to deposits off of the Chenango Canal Path. This is on private property, so thanks to Todd (a different one) and his family for letting me bushwhack through their property to find the large clay pit there.
“The final source of clay came from Kirkland Town Park. All of the clay I used in this project came from here, as it was the easiest to access and had a much richer color and more plasticity than the clays from the other sites.”
Most clay dug straight out of the ground is called terra cotta, or earthenware, which is a kind of clay that fully matures at low kiln temperatures. It is typically full of organic matter like roots, so the first step is to mix the clay with water so that it can be poured through a sieve to remove the organic matter. Once this is done, the water is removed from the clay, generally through evaporation, until it has the right working consistency to be viable for use in a kiln. Griffin, however, found that the pure terra cotta was not very plastic (that is, it could not bend easily without cracking, which is a desirable quality in clay), was not structurally sound, and slumped easily.
Therefore, as a next step, Griffin mixed the clay with other add-ins (plastic clays and grog) to achieve the desired workability. Griffin explained that “this part of the process took a week or two of a lot of empirical testing, and I suspect that my final clay body is about 60–70% of the pure terra cotta. For a bucket (maybe 40–50 lbs), the whole process, not including digging, probably took around 4–5 hours of manual labor, and 4–5 days of waiting.”
It is easy to forget how significant a role ceramics play in our day-to-day lives. Inside our brick, cement, and glass residence halls, we wash in the tiled bathrooms. In our dining halls, we eat on ceramic cups and bowls. Students work all day on a computer (packed with ceramic-based electronic components) before heading back to the dining hall, gobbling down dinner from those same pieces of pottery, sitting in front of a liquid-crystal TV to watch college football, and then heading for bed and repeating again the next day. Though it is far from obvious, we live in a ceramic world, just as people have for thousands of years. By using ceramics as the medium for his art, Griffin said that he “sought to convey my perception and my understanding of living in the city and living in Central New York, as well as show people some of the things that I learned a lot about over the summer.”
World-famous ceramic artist William Wilhelmi once described how clay art is both universal and personal: “The thing about clay is every culture knows clay, because they use it. That is one of the advantages of working in clay. Everybody can relate to clay. It’s been part of our human evolution. And it goes from very basic to extremely baroque things. And also as one lives one’s life, you can take in all your experiences. Then when I sit down to work, these things come out. It is the experience of life you reflect in your work.”
Griffin’s work will be on view on the second floor of KTSA until Sept. 30.
