Glaze experimentaion on red terracotta, April 2026.Form experimentation on black stoneware clay, October 2024.
Of Earth, Unapologetically
2026
In ceramics, value often is assigned depending on how far a material has travelled from the earth it came from.
These two vessels are the same form made unequal by material. I built them by hand and carved the same marks onto both surfaces. The difference lies in the clay: one is black stoneware, finished with a matte translucent glaze; the other is red terracotta, left entirely unglazed.
The bag of terracotta came to me as a gift and led me somewhere I had not intended to go. Terracotta fires at a lower temperature (between 900°C–1,100°C) than stoneware (between 1,200°C–1,300°C), ruling out most of the glazes I normally work with. Practically speaking, my options were limited. But the longer I sat with the piece, the more I questioned why I was searching for a glaze at all.
A ceramicist friend once mentioned, almost in passing, that terracotta plant pots look cheap. I understood the association, but I found myself questioning where that perception came from.
Looking at the language surrounding ceramic materials, a hierarchy begins to reveal itself. Terracotta means ‘baked earth’. The name is direct and unembellished; it tells you exactly what it is. Above it sits stoneware, named for stone, harder and more durable, already further removed from the ground. Further along is porcelain, the most prized material of all. Named not for earth, but for the cowrie shell it was thought to resemble, valued for its translucency, whiteness, and distance from anything raw.
The more refined the material, the further its name travels from the earth it came from. Prestige in ceramics is, in part, a story about distance from origin. What are considered terracotta’s ‘impurities’ are simply the earth in a less processed state, and it is precisely those impurities that place it at the bottom of that hierarchy.
It felt important to leave the terracotta bare. Glaze can function as a form of refinement, a way of making a material appear more finished, more acceptable. I wanted to resist that impulse. I was not interested in softening the rawness of the clay; I wanted the material to retain its proximity to the earth it came from.
By placing the red clay beside the black, in the same form and bearing the same marks, I wanted to see what emerged from that comparison without directing the outcome.
The vessels are not presented as opposites to be judged and ranked against one another. It is to shift the focus from beauty to the systems through which beauty is assigned. It asks whether our sense of value in materials is aesthetic, cultural, or simply inherited.