The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
1 The Ceramic Materials Atlas homepage.
This article discusses the Ceramic Materials Atlas (CMA), an ongoing environmental humanities and storytelling project that originated with Professors Del Harrow and Lynn Badia at Colorado State University. The CMA aims to tell the stories of industrial ceramic materials and, in so doing, draw out the connections between political economy, planetary science, and contemporary ceramics. To see more of the CMA, please visit ceramicmaterialsatlas.com/about.
There are so many ways to begin to talk about the Ceramic Materials Atlas—a project pulling at the hermeneutic threads of industrial ceramic materials—but, in the name of a good time, I’m going to choose this one: the 1967 essay “The
Death of the Author” by the literary theorist, philosopher, and semiotician Roland Barthes.
Object Storytelling
Barthes’ essay appeared at the tail end of a wave of structuralist thinking in the arts and social sciences. The idea that social and cultural phenomena could be coolly picked apart—subdivided into patterns and systems, their underlying meanings
laid bare—was the reigning analytical force of the day. Barthes pushed back. Barthes argued that, when it comes to reading and interpreting a text, there is no single, authoritative interpretation, no ready-made meaning. Instead, our understanding
of a text is something that happens each time we read it. Meaning is something the reader, not the author, creates. Whatever an author might have intended us to think or feel doesn’t matter—and to believe it does imposes an arbitrary limit
on a text, curtailing, or even negating, our experience of it. “[It] close[s] the writing,” Barthes wrote. By killing the author, we give birth to the reader. Only then can real writing take place.
2 A wagon train of mules and horses pulls a heavy load of borax through the Mojave desert. Photographer: Albertype Company, 20 mule Borax team, Mojave, Cal. Valley line, ca. 1880–1890, photographic print. Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013647267.3 A miner working for the Anaconda Mining Company. Anaconda was one of the largest mining companies in the world, and famously operated the copper mines in Butte, Montana, and Chuquicamata, Chile. Photographer: Lee, Russell, Butte, Montana. Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Miner on the surface, 1942, photographic print. Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017836999.
The idea of authorship is closely tied to the idea of authority. Conventional forms of imagination portray the author (or artist, or craftsperson, or engineer) as divinely inspired, a lone genius, with a rarified, privileged view of what they make. As
a way of further divorcing the two, Barthes referred to the modern writer as a scribe or scriptor. Elsewhere, Barthes is known for his distinction between “readerly texts,” texts that inspire passivity in a reader, and “writerly
texts,” in which readers are active accomplices in the production of meaning.
Barthes was thinking about language and literature—not visual art, not craft, not ceramics. But these ideas resonate for me when thinking about any creative work or practice, and they particularly resonate in a project such as the CMA, which is
dedicated to a kind of “object storytelling” and to the unruly, inadvertent layers of meaning embedded in contemporary ceramics.
Currently, the public-facing side of the CMA consists of a series of short-form essays on specific ceramic materials. The aim of these short-form essays is to tear down the wall of anonymity and homogeneity that obscures industrial materials and consider
these materials in a more holistic, individualized context: What precise hole in the ground does a material come from? What planetary processes—geological, hydrological, biological—brought a material into being? What history does a material
convey? What voices speak through it? What metaphors has it accrued? In some ways, this kind of story-telling echoes the 19th-century “it-narrative,” a genre of literature meant to tell the stories of non-human beings and objects as they
move about the world. Narrativizing industrial materials is a particularly difficult task. The CMA is still in the process of converting research on various materials into narrative form, and certainly welcomes interest and collaboration with writers
and storytellers in our ceramics community.
Expressing the Land
The CMA began with a simple premise: clay is an expression of the land. In the contemporary ceramics studio, that expression is mediated through the rapaciousness of capitalism and a prodigious, transnational web that strips away and concentrates particular
types of earth materials around the globe. This extractive economy is the literal bedrock of modern life, and it has “honeycombed vast portions [of the planet] . . . leveled old mountains and created new ones, fashioned massive open-pit wastelands
and buried entire valleys in waste rock . . . [as well as created some of our planet’s] most troubling and enduring environmental problems.”1
The scale of these operations is so immense, that they constitute a geologic process all their own: human beings currently move more sediment around the globe than all the world’s rivers combined.2 Some have even suggested that, given
the all-encompassing nature of human terraforming (a literal “sculpting” of the surface of the planet), we might now begin to think of the Earth itself as a cultural production, or artwork.
4 Excerpt from a comic strip about the use of potash ores in synthetic fertilizers. Ceramic materials connect us to disparate ideologies, economies, environmental processes, and cultural practices. Excerpted from: Commercial Comics, Inc. and National Fertilizer Association, The Conquest of Hunger: Featuring Prosper Plenty and His Magical Chemicals, 1951. Photo: Science History Institute, Philadelphia, PA, digital.sciencehistory.org/works/wkhj76n.5 Excerpt from a comic strip about the use of potash ores in synthetic fertilizers. Ceramic materials connect us to disparate ideologies, economies, environmental processes, and cultural practices. Excerpted from: Commercial Comics, Inc. and National Fertilizer Association, The Conquest of Hunger: Featuring Prosper Plenty and His Magical Chemicals, 1951. Photo: Science History Institute, Philadelphia, PA, digital.sciencehistory.org/works/wkhj76n.
Materialism
Studio ceramics is certainly not the driver of industrial extraction, but we do exist within it—a fact apparent in the sheer energetic abundance and material diversity that characterizes many contemporary studios. Typically, in the ceramic studio
as in our daily lives, we act as though this doesn’t matter. We are taught to have a pragmatic relationship with our materials: before creative or intellectual intervention, matter is fundamentally meaningless. The CMA takes a different approach.
By developing a deeper understanding of the raw materials flowing into our studios—by better understanding what they are, where they come from, and how they came into being—can we see them as inherently meaningful? Does the history of
the Black Hills, for instance, influence how we see objects made from Custer feldspar? Do the conflicts over lithium, cobalt, or chrome complicate our understanding of artworks made with those materials? What other stories, histories, and philosophies
can ceramic objects signify? Who, or what, inscribes ceramics with meaning?
This is, in part, a deeply Marxist idea—that a product, or cultural work, cannot be “abstracted or independent from the processes that produced it.”3 It also falls under the banner of “neo-materialism,” a broad
intellectual movement that calls on us to understand human politics, human economy, and human culture as part of—in fact, on equal footing with—non-human material processes and relations. A subversive creative and interpretive politics
lies at the heart of materialist thinking. We’re encouraged to think far less about the author, artist, or craftsperson, and instead about the complex web of forces that, collectively, create material culture. Or, in Barthesian terms, material
culture as “a tissue of quotations drawn from . . . innumerable centers of culture,” a kind of distributive writing, conceived and molded by the distributive intelligence in all things.
It is always worth reiterating that this kind of thinking is not new. What Western scholars might refer to as “vital materialism” is part of the cultural heritage of many peoples around the world. What is revelatory or “avant-garde”
for some, already exists as traditional knowledge for many others.
6 View of the Berkeley Pit, a historic copper mining site in Butte, Montana. Today, the Berkeley Pitt is part of one of the largest Superfund areas in the US. Wastewater from thousands of miles of underground mine passageways continually refills the pit with sulfuric acid and arsenic. Photographer: Highsmith, Carol M., The Berkeley Pit, now a heavily acidic wastewater lake, and tourist attraction, in Butte, Montana, a thriving late 1800s and early 1900s gold, silver, and copper mining boomtown, prosperous that it was known as “The Richest Hill on Earth,” 2022, digital photograph. Photo: Library of Congress, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2023698362.
Metabolic Rift
Recently, I moved to southwestern Montana, a part of the US where the aftershocks of industrial mining are front of mind and deeply felt. Beginning in the late 19th century with the growing push for widespread electrification, huge amounts of copper ore
were extracted from western Montana, heated and refined in massive smelters, then shipped all over the globe. The western side of the state is littered with environmental disasters as a result, including one of the largest Superfund areas in the US.
Because of all of this, and because of the CMA, I have been thinking about the role of copper in ceramics—not only as a historical colorant in glazes but also as a contemporary source of power. Montana’s copper, through electrical wiring,
has provided heat work and alchemical energy—it has also been the source of raw political power that has shaped not only Montana, but also the US, and indeed, has stretched to other parts of the globe.
7 Rio Tinto Borax mine in Boron, California. Photo: NASA.
There is a term I often turn to when thinking about the connection between political economy and geology, and issues of extraction, capitalism, and energy on a tectonic scale: metabolic rift. It is a Marxist term used to describe the unequal distribution
and metabolization of resources, and energy, around the planet. Personally, it has been useful to me in connecting the dots between planetary processes that cycle through vast amounts of energy, such as the constant formation and deformation of Earth’s
crust, and human processes, such as extraction and imperialism, that redirect, hoard, and consume immense amounts of that same energy. Given how much we, as ceramic artists and craftspeople, are used to thinking about the land and the powerful
forces that shape it—the incredible heat of the crust, the mineralization, the drift, the uplift, the water carving at the surface, the material settling into valleys, the unimaginable amounts of time and energy involved—this term also
resonates with me at the heart of our field. All of our actions are part of the fabric of a vast planetary metabolism—there is no outside. The CMA urges us to consider this more deeply. How do our materials shape us and the things we make? Their
abundance, their specificity, their individual histories—what do these materials signify in the culture we create?
Oftentimes, conversations around industrial sourcing tend to dead-end in a kind of finger wagging, or else an attempt to make small material changes in our personal practices. Yet, I think we do a disservice when we abandon the conversation there. For
one thing, if we want to put an ecological understanding of ourselves into practice, doing so requires that we dismiss the centrality of our own narrative. We are not the authors here. We are embedded, in Barthes’ words, in a “tissue of
signs,” the disparate meanings of which may elude or contradict us. For another, regardless of whatever change we make in our individual studios, this conversation cannot be siloed to ceramics or the small number of objects and materials
we deem “culturally meaningful.” Instead, it’s a conversation about the way in which contemporary ceramics is a tiny emblem of the economies, materials, and infrastructures that make up the very fabric of our lives—as well
as the economic, political, and cultural visions we push for as a result.
the author Rose Schreiber is a ceramic artist from Chicago, Illinois. Currently, she is a visiting professor in ceramic art at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. Through her artwork and research, Schreiber focuses on the intersection of environmental philosophy and ceramic art and materials—exploring issues of land, power, extraction, the planetary imaginary, and geologic poetics. To learn more, visit www.roseschreiber.comor follow her on Instagram @lightning_strikes_of_summer.
1 J.R. McNeill, George Vrtis, Mining North America, University of California Press, 2017, 2.
2 Cooper, Anthony; Brown, Teresa; Price, Simon; Ford, Jonathan; Waters, Colin. “Humans are the most significant global geomorphological driving force of the 21st century.” The Anthropocene Review 5 (2018).
3 Nail, Thomas, Theory of the Earth, Stanford University Press, 2021, 262.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
This article discusses the Ceramic Materials Atlas (CMA), an ongoing environmental humanities and storytelling project that originated with Professors Del Harrow and Lynn Badia at Colorado State University. The CMA aims to tell the stories of industrial ceramic materials and, in so doing, draw out the connections between political economy, planetary science, and contemporary ceramics. To see more of the CMA, please visit ceramicmaterialsatlas.com/about.
There are so many ways to begin to talk about the Ceramic Materials Atlas—a project pulling at the hermeneutic threads of industrial ceramic materials—but, in the name of a good time, I’m going to choose this one: the 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” by the literary theorist, philosopher, and semiotician Roland Barthes.
Object Storytelling
Barthes’ essay appeared at the tail end of a wave of structuralist thinking in the arts and social sciences. The idea that social and cultural phenomena could be coolly picked apart—subdivided into patterns and systems, their underlying meanings laid bare—was the reigning analytical force of the day. Barthes pushed back. Barthes argued that, when it comes to reading and interpreting a text, there is no single, authoritative interpretation, no ready-made meaning. Instead, our understanding of a text is something that happens each time we read it. Meaning is something the reader, not the author, creates. Whatever an author might have intended us to think or feel doesn’t matter—and to believe it does imposes an arbitrary limit on a text, curtailing, or even negating, our experience of it. “[It] close[s] the writing,” Barthes wrote. By killing the author, we give birth to the reader. Only then can real writing take place.
The idea of authorship is closely tied to the idea of authority. Conventional forms of imagination portray the author (or artist, or craftsperson, or engineer) as divinely inspired, a lone genius, with a rarified, privileged view of what they make. As a way of further divorcing the two, Barthes referred to the modern writer as a scribe or scriptor. Elsewhere, Barthes is known for his distinction between “readerly texts,” texts that inspire passivity in a reader, and “writerly texts,” in which readers are active accomplices in the production of meaning.
Barthes was thinking about language and literature—not visual art, not craft, not ceramics. But these ideas resonate for me when thinking about any creative work or practice, and they particularly resonate in a project such as the CMA, which is dedicated to a kind of “object storytelling” and to the unruly, inadvertent layers of meaning embedded in contemporary ceramics.
Currently, the public-facing side of the CMA consists of a series of short-form essays on specific ceramic materials. The aim of these short-form essays is to tear down the wall of anonymity and homogeneity that obscures industrial materials and consider these materials in a more holistic, individualized context: What precise hole in the ground does a material come from? What planetary processes—geological, hydrological, biological—brought a material into being? What history does a material convey? What voices speak through it? What metaphors has it accrued? In some ways, this kind of story-telling echoes the 19th-century “it-narrative,” a genre of literature meant to tell the stories of non-human beings and objects as they move about the world. Narrativizing industrial materials is a particularly difficult task. The CMA is still in the process of converting research on various materials into narrative form, and certainly welcomes interest and collaboration with writers and storytellers in our ceramics community.
Expressing the Land
The CMA began with a simple premise: clay is an expression of the land. In the contemporary ceramics studio, that expression is mediated through the rapaciousness of capitalism and a prodigious, transnational web that strips away and concentrates particular types of earth materials around the globe. This extractive economy is the literal bedrock of modern life, and it has “honeycombed vast portions [of the planet] . . . leveled old mountains and created new ones, fashioned massive open-pit wastelands and buried entire valleys in waste rock . . . [as well as created some of our planet’s] most troubling and enduring environmental problems.”1
The scale of these operations is so immense, that they constitute a geologic process all their own: human beings currently move more sediment around the globe than all the world’s rivers combined.2 Some have even suggested that, given the all-encompassing nature of human terraforming (a literal “sculpting” of the surface of the planet), we might now begin to think of the Earth itself as a cultural production, or artwork.
Materialism
Studio ceramics is certainly not the driver of industrial extraction, but we do exist within it—a fact apparent in the sheer energetic abundance and material diversity that characterizes many contemporary studios. Typically, in the ceramic studio as in our daily lives, we act as though this doesn’t matter. We are taught to have a pragmatic relationship with our materials: before creative or intellectual intervention, matter is fundamentally meaningless. The CMA takes a different approach. By developing a deeper understanding of the raw materials flowing into our studios—by better understanding what they are, where they come from, and how they came into being—can we see them as inherently meaningful? Does the history of the Black Hills, for instance, influence how we see objects made from Custer feldspar? Do the conflicts over lithium, cobalt, or chrome complicate our understanding of artworks made with those materials? What other stories, histories, and philosophies can ceramic objects signify? Who, or what, inscribes ceramics with meaning?
This is, in part, a deeply Marxist idea—that a product, or cultural work, cannot be “abstracted or independent from the processes that produced it.”3 It also falls under the banner of “neo-materialism,” a broad intellectual movement that calls on us to understand human politics, human economy, and human culture as part of—in fact, on equal footing with—non-human material processes and relations. A subversive creative and interpretive politics lies at the heart of materialist thinking. We’re encouraged to think far less about the author, artist, or craftsperson, and instead about the complex web of forces that, collectively, create material culture. Or, in Barthesian terms, material culture as “a tissue of quotations drawn from . . . innumerable centers of culture,” a kind of distributive writing, conceived and molded by the distributive intelligence in all things.
It is always worth reiterating that this kind of thinking is not new. What Western scholars might refer to as “vital materialism” is part of the cultural heritage of many peoples around the world. What is revelatory or “avant-garde” for some, already exists as traditional knowledge for many others.
Metabolic Rift
Recently, I moved to southwestern Montana, a part of the US where the aftershocks of industrial mining are front of mind and deeply felt. Beginning in the late 19th century with the growing push for widespread electrification, huge amounts of copper ore were extracted from western Montana, heated and refined in massive smelters, then shipped all over the globe. The western side of the state is littered with environmental disasters as a result, including one of the largest Superfund areas in the US. Because of all of this, and because of the CMA, I have been thinking about the role of copper in ceramics—not only as a historical colorant in glazes but also as a contemporary source of power. Montana’s copper, through electrical wiring, has provided heat work and alchemical energy—it has also been the source of raw political power that has shaped not only Montana, but also the US, and indeed, has stretched to other parts of the globe.
There is a term I often turn to when thinking about the connection between political economy and geology, and issues of extraction, capitalism, and energy on a tectonic scale: metabolic rift. It is a Marxist term used to describe the unequal distribution and metabolization of resources, and energy, around the planet. Personally, it has been useful to me in connecting the dots between planetary processes that cycle through vast amounts of energy, such as the constant formation and deformation of Earth’s crust, and human processes, such as extraction and imperialism, that redirect, hoard, and consume immense amounts of that same energy. Given how much we, as ceramic artists and craftspeople, are used to thinking about the land and the powerful forces that shape it—the incredible heat of the crust, the mineralization, the drift, the uplift, the water carving at the surface, the material settling into valleys, the unimaginable amounts of time and energy involved—this term also resonates with me at the heart of our field. All of our actions are part of the fabric of a vast planetary metabolism—there is no outside. The CMA urges us to consider this more deeply. How do our materials shape us and the things we make? Their abundance, their specificity, their individual histories—what do these materials signify in the culture we create?
Oftentimes, conversations around industrial sourcing tend to dead-end in a kind of finger wagging, or else an attempt to make small material changes in our personal practices. Yet, I think we do a disservice when we abandon the conversation there. For one thing, if we want to put an ecological understanding of ourselves into practice, doing so requires that we dismiss the centrality of our own narrative. We are not the authors here. We are embedded, in Barthes’ words, in a “tissue of signs,” the disparate meanings of which may elude or contradict us. For another, regardless of whatever change we make in our individual studios, this conversation cannot be siloed to ceramics or the small number of objects and materials we deem “culturally meaningful.” Instead, it’s a conversation about the way in which contemporary ceramics is a tiny emblem of the economies, materials, and infrastructures that make up the very fabric of our lives—as well as the economic, political, and cultural visions we push for as a result.
the author Rose Schreiber is a ceramic artist from Chicago, Illinois. Currently, she is a visiting professor in ceramic art at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. Through her artwork and research, Schreiber focuses on the intersection of environmental philosophy and ceramic art and materials—exploring issues of land, power, extraction, the planetary imaginary, and geologic poetics. To learn more, visit www.roseschreiber.com or follow her on Instagram @lightning_strikes_of_summer.
1 J.R. McNeill, George Vrtis, Mining North America, University of California Press, 2017, 2.
2 Cooper, Anthony; Brown, Teresa; Price, Simon; Ford, Jonathan; Waters, Colin. “Humans are the most significant global geomorphological driving force of the 21st century.” The Anthropocene Review 5 (2018).
3 Nail, Thomas, Theory of the Earth, Stanford University Press, 2021, 262.
Caption 2: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013647267
Caption 3: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017836999
Caption 4,5: digital.sciencehistory.org/works/wkhj76n
Caption 6: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2023698362
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