“What do you do when you run out of your favorite soil?”
This is a question I often get asked during my wild soil presentations, and my answer is always a nonchalant, “I never get attached to a soil.” After all, for me it’s really about the process—about learning how to work with a given material and figuring out its challenges. Once I am successfully able to replicate the desired results, I am usually ready to move on to the next challenge, so why would I get attached?
All of this was true—and rather liberating—until that fateful day when I was handed a Ziploc bag full of a certain soil from Claremont, San Diego.
It happened last February, just as I was wrapping up my workshop at City College San Diego. David, one of the participants, and I had connected over our mutual love of wild clay, and just as I was about to leave, David—who at the time was deep into his own research on a soil he had collected locally in Claremont—decided I should go home with some of it.
Little did I know that this sample would become the subject of my obsession and lead me down a rabbit hole of research and testing.
Ah, but I seem to be getting ahead of myself.
To go back to events in a more chronological fashion, I came home with the soil, and it sat on my shelf with the other samples, forgotten for the time being as I made work for the St. Croix Pottery Tour. After the show, as I started my summer residency, I remembered all the soils waiting to be tested.
So I did the usual drill: made tests, altered chemistry, applied them to small pieces, learned how the glazes worked, and then committed some of the soils to more elaborate forms. As I looked at the results, I found myself being drawn in by the look and feel of the pieces made with the Claremont soil in a way I hadn’t experienced with any soil before. The pots gave off a quiet wood-fired vibe, reminiscent of anagama firing.
I made more pieces with the soil and was rewarded with the same results.
The slowly depleting stash made me panic, and I realized that I had most certainly gotten attached to this soil.
In desperation, I reached out to David, who very kindly mailed me a few more pounds from his personal stash. I now had enough for a bunch of pieces, but an insecurity niggled at the back of my mind.
What if I wasn’t satisfied even after going through this lot and needed more?
What if my usual “ready to move on to something new” tendency didn’t kick in, and I was still fixated on this soil even as I scraped the last dregs from the bag?
There was a large piece I had made a few months earlier that I hadn’t finished glazing because I wanted it to have the look I got from the Claremont soil. But glazing it would take most of the additional soil I had received. Was it wise to use all my soil on this one piece, or should I save it to make many smaller pieces?
Either way, what was I to do when the stash ran out?
Contending with this predicament as I continued my studio practice, I wondered if somehow I could simulate the look of the Claremont soil using the materials I already had in my studio. How and when that simple thought morphed into an obsession, I have no recollection, but I found myself consumed by it for most of December.
Not knowing where to begin, I started by researching the makeup of the soils in the Claremont area and from there sketched out some guidelines and variables to alter in my quest to achieve that look. Every day I mixed chemicals, applied them to test tiles, fired them in my test kiln, and awaited the results with eager anticipation.
I was met with a string of failures that forced me to rework my recipes over and over again until, at last, a few weeks into testing, I achieved my first success.
After that, it was simply a matter of fine-tuning the recipe.
And then came time for the “cola test.”
Just as you might set out different colas and ask someone to identify Coca-Cola or Pepsi based solely on taste, I glazed and fired five different cups—one with the original soil and the rest with slightly varying iterations of the formula I had deemed successful. My task was to identify the original based solely on appearance.
Can you believe my surprise when the cup I thought had been glazed with the original soil was actually the simulated formula?
When I look closely at the original, I can still see some minor differences. But the fact that I chose the simulated version as my favorite means I can call the research a success.
I have learned so much from this process, and I am deeply grateful to David, who so generously shared the soil that became the source of one of my biggest learning experiences this year.
