A series of ceramic vessels cast using wild clays harvested from soils around Appalachia. Each clay harvested contains its own unique "recipe" of trace metals introduced by human activity: zinc, from the fly ash of the coal combustion process; lead, from gasolines & lead smelting in the area; chromium, from soil leaching within slag dumps. Once pit fired, these non-indigenous elements within the clay bodies chemically react to introduce beautiful colors and textures.

In this Archive, I hope to make invisible material legacy visible. By harvesting matter contaminated by industry, processing it, and casting it into objects, I capture a moment informed by an entanglement of both massive geological forces and the recent human forces of labor, extraction, and relentless striving. These forces that reshape material narrative are not so different; the settling of material on this planet, building strata of rock,and slip casting, building walls of a vessel, are both processes of sedimentation—with only vastly different scales of space and time.

[This project was gratefully supported by the Steve Jobs Archive Fellowship and the Carnegie Mellon University Undergraduate Research Fund]