S3, Episode Five: Oren Shoesmith

The Clay Commons Podcast is so excited to offer this episode with Adebunmi Gbadebo (Ah Day Boo mi, Bha Day Bo), fresh from her successes at the Venice Biennale. Her practice is as a multidisciplinary artist working with paper, ceramics, sound, and film, exploring the archival record of her family’s ancestry in Nigeria and enslavement in USA. Through her research, material selection, and technical process, the artist emphasizes the prejudice of the historical record, activating her practice to restore Black subjectivity. This is an unbelievably generous and inspiring conversation and approach to the conceptual and restorative use of foraged materials within ceramic practice rooted in experimentation, reimagining indigenous craft and uncovering ancient narratives embedded in the making of utilitarian objects. This episode also marks the launch of our official membership programming! These podcast episodes will now come with exclusive membership opportunities for our members to meet our guests and each other during online seminars. Do check out our website for information about how to sign up and book onto what I’m sure will be an incredibly enriching and inspiring addition to this episode. The next four episodes loosely revolve around the idea of Sustainability, looking at this zeitgeist topic through the lens of conceptual art practice and reparative land processes with Adebunmi, before moving onto ideas of sustainability as they manifest within community, research and studio.https://adebunmi.carbonmade.com/ @adebooms

I’m so grateful to be able to share this conversation with our final board member, Oren Shoesmith. Oren is a Cornish artist and writer living in Scotland. He works in an entangled way between clay, poetry, performance and film and his practice centres around unruly lands and bodies, finding paths of liberation through boglands, claylands and gender borders. Currently his research is focused on industrial histories of extraction, land dispossession, and re-imagining devotional earth-based practices.Oren brings an embedded connection to clay which offers an invitation to explore and connect to a form of material spirituality that I feel is often missing from our contemporary lives and which I find deeply nourishing. I can’t wait for you to share his wisdom and thoughts through this conversation. https://www.orenshoesmith.co.uk@orenshoesmith

This time we’re meeting the wonderful Carla Wright, an artist working in ceramic sculpture, sound and wall-based works that explore community architecture and shared spaces of gathering. She also runs her own community interest company and ceramic studio in Bexhill-on-sea in south England is called Common Clay, so we’re closely linked by name as well as practice! We’re both deeply invested in clay as both an artistic material and a means of connection and commonality and I’m thrilled to have her understanding and care behind The Clay Commons. This conversation is a rich dive into what it means to run accessible ceramic spaces that cut across class and physical barriers, practical musings on how we pay ourselves as artists and facilitators and even a bit about tuning into clay time and embracing slowness.https://carlawright.co.uk/https://commonclay.co.uk/@common.clay@_carlawright

We're starting Season Three with four episodes introducing our Non-Executive Board at The Clay Commons, four amazing artists working across a broad spectrum of clay and ceramic practice: Isis Dove Edwin, Carla Wright, Simeon Featherstone, and Oren Shoesmith. The Clay Commons is a communal effort and I'm so grateful to our board for helping guide us and am excited to give our listeners more context and lived experience as to why we started this journey and what we hope to achieve.We’re starting with Isis Dove-Edwin, a wonderful artist who came to clay as a second career and has developed a practice of sculptural vessels that explores clay as a material of agency, power and resistance for people across the Black African diaspora, alongside a collaborative practice with artist Leonora Lockhart, called 2nd Shift, which is researching and creating opportunities around being an artist-mother. We had a wonderfully enriching conversation about the challenges and inspirations of bring an being an artist mother, matrilineal knowledge, and non-linear journeys into clay. https://ideceramics.com/about-1@isisdoveedwin@the_2nd_shift

I'm thrilled to introduce my long-time friend and critical craft and community guide, Simeon Feathertstone, who's a repeat offender at The Clay Commons and has been a guiding voice since its inception.Simeon is currently Associate Lecturer, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, & Curriculum Lead for Ceramics at Morley College, and he also has a long established career as the co-founder of Parasite Ceramics an organisation that primarily produces collaborative public clay projects that focus on promoting community values, co-creative partnerships and sense of identity. Both with Parasite ceramics and as an artists-facilitator in his own right, Simeon has created numerous ceramic artworks and public realm projects throughout the UK though national and local organisations for diverse audiences and communities. We got into it during this conversation discussing how to navigate formal and informal spaces of learning, the social value of clay and material knowledge and how we pass on that knowledge maker to maker.  https://simeonfeatherstone.co.uk@simeonfeatherstone

We're back! The Clay Commons Podcast is back and relaunching Season Three with a new look, new guests, new format and a new membership at www.theclaycommons.org. In this episode, our host Eva Masterman reintroduces the concepts, practices and communities behind The Clay Commons and lays the ground for our future plans. The Clay Commons Podcast is an entry point to a new membership programme and community supporting the development of ceramic learning, engagement and practice across an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse landscape. We've got some amazing conversations lined up that provide a space to exchange knowledge and resources on current issues, build relationships and collaborations, grow audiences and solve challenges with peers.Join us to explore the why, where and with whom of clay practice and join a growing clay community that is working towards a thriving, clay-centered future.

Episode two is about DOING THE WORK y’all! And that means slowing down, decentring yourself, centring the community, challenging the status quo and constantly reflecting on your organisational structures and being open to your blind spots. This conversation flits between Watershed Centre for the Ceramic Arts in northern rural Maine and Black Hound Clay Studios in Philadelphia. And whilst the concerns of rural v city are obviously specific and different, the ideas that underpin how to run these spaces are not so. They are both heavily invested in building community through education, providing spaces for those who can’t access higher ed, and the importance of place and making people feel welcome and like they belong. What emerged many times during this trip was the idea of administration as an act of care and as a container for creative practice. That the labour involved in running these spaces was as important as the work that was created in them. Within that is a shift in the idea of learning, away from short term, once-accessed exam-based institutions, and towards a life-long embedded practice, creating places people can access throughout their lives. Obviously financing this is a massive issue, but we touch on that too – ever thought of sliding scale financing? Redistribution? Mutual aid? This episode is all about how we can do things better, and the importance of having a reflexive practice as an organisation, to ensure that you serve the entirety of your community, not just the ones who can pay. Contributors:Black Hound Clay Studio https://www.blackhoundclay.com/Watershed Centre for the Ceramic Arts https://www.watershedceramics.org/Clay Commons was written and produced by Eva Masterman, editing supported by Travis Roush. This podcast was supported by Newcastle University, and the Northern Bridge AHRC Consortium. Artwork created by Kelly Jade Audio credits:-       "Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org-       "Ambience, Seaside Waves, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

So, this one doesn’t really mention clay, but allow me some poetic licence and imagine for a moment that clay is also land (which it is). I’m ashamed to say that the Land Back movement was not something I’d really engaged with or had even heard of much before this season. This is the battle for indigenous nations and people to get back land that’s been stolen from them. And yes, this is meant literally. Give it back. Many of the bigger organisations I went to mentioned things like ‘land acknowledgments’, which seems like a step, but when we’re talking about up to and over 200acres of privately owned land in some cases, what does a mere acknowledgement that it was stolen, actually do? Not a huge amount, practically.  And land means so much. It's not just resources, though that's important, it's also culture, food, education, autonomy, commuinity.We take so much for granted. And so much of what we have was built on the profits of genocide and unspeakable violence. Not to be a downer, but we really need to start doing more than ‘acknowledging’ this. What does collective liberation look like in a world so divided? How can we start thinking about redistribution and changing our thinking from growth to thrive, from scarcity to abundance? These are not easy questions to answer, but I hope we can start to work through them together, on whoever’s land we might be standing on right now. Contributor:Jeremy Dennis, President of Ma's House  https://www.mashouse.studio/ Clay Commons was written and produced by Eva Masterman, editing supported by Travis Roush. This podcast was supported by Newcastle University, and the Northern Bridge AHRC Consortium. Artwork created by Kelly Jade Audio credits:-       "Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org-       "Ambience, Seaside Waves, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org-       Music in background is kindly given by Jonathan Hawk @ambient_techno and his recording Youngblood Singers - Grand Entry Song - Shinnecock Pow Wow 2022 Saturday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NVmX7I7M_Y 

I realise now that episode 1 of season 1 also started with the institution of ‘school’ in some ways , but oh well, at least I’m consistent!  Ep 1 is talking about craft schools, mainly, but also what it means to have a craft education. What’s it for? What has it missed out? What does it promise? In the US, many of craft schools were made possible through the GI Bill, a state fund from the mid 40s that supported initiatives and education for returning veterans. Seems kind of unlikely in our current climate, but much of this government money was funnelled into craft and art education. A well known beneficiary might be Black Mountain College. Other schools like Penland School of Craft, and Worcester Craft Center began life as schools for European colonial-settler women to learn and perpetuate handcrafts to make a living. Both of these origins struck me as interesting, as, whilst we’re obviously acknowledging the whiteness and colonialism that is inherent to this narrative, the schools were arguably set up with a social directive. The looming beast of capitalism means that the utopian promise of craft suggested by the likes of William Morris, Bernard Leach, or – in this episode –  MC Richards, doesn’t really operate that way, but I loved this idea. That if we look at the underpinnings of what craft education can offer us, and how it’s operated in society, it offers us a way of being in the world that centres: people, environment, community, and not: profit, extraction and indoctrination into a failed state. Anyone interested….?Contributors:Michelle Millar Fisher https://michellemillarfisher.com/Tom O'Malley, director Worcester Craft Centre https://worcestercraftcenter.org/Sara Clugage https://dilettantearmy.com/Fabio Fernandez, director Greenwich House Pottery https://www.greenwichhouse.org/pottery/Clay Commons was written and produced by Eva Masterman, editing supported by Travis Roush. This podcast was supported by Newcastle University, and the Northern Bridge AHRC Consortium. Artwork created by Kelly Jade Audio credits:-       "Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org-       "Ambience, Seaside Waves, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

I'll let this one stand on its own - a little something from my current phd, to end on an intent for the future.  To You and Clay and Beyond.