An Ode to clay and it’s earliest objects.

No other material comes close in its ability to informing us more about ourselves than shards or broken pieces of objects of times past, made of clay. This fact alone could render clay the most valuable material found and used on earth. Despite it being a testimony and repository of our past civilisations, clay, the herald, is a material today attributed with little significance. 

If it is because of its abundance, perhaps it comes to show that the way we ascribe value to objects relies on the rarity of the material? What then of totem objects carved from mere stone, that are held in highest regard for entire groups of a population. A proper system of valuation can be difficult to decipher, as it relies not just on the rarity of material or on pure function of the object, its form or a common consensus for beauty, but it is rather a fluctuating combination of them all.

By recalling some of most earliest objects made of clay, and the significance they held in times much simpler, I want to rethink what value means to us. Clay has played a crucial role in the development of our species, with fire came the first cooking vessels, with writing followed the inscriptions on clay tablets and trade, the first roads and the adobes that set the foundation of our earliest settlements.

While hand-building these objects of clay that are reminiscent of ways in which we earlier assigned value, I want to remember how much clay as a material has built us.

Written by Latika Nehra, edited by Volker Gross, 2022, Berlin