This book brings together nine artists who explore their personal ecologies.
This publication is also archived in the National Library of New Zealand.
I Am Clay
Every material in artistic practice, whether clay, metal, light, sound, or plant life, carries its own history, energy, and will. These materials do not exist to serve the artist’s expression, but rather as integral parts of the world itself, breathing, shifting, and resisting alongside us.
As Emilie Rākete (2016), nonhuman beings and materials possess agency through their whakapapa and relational embeddedness, not through human assignment.
Through this understanding, I have come to see that creation is not an act of domination over materials, but a dialogue and collaboration with them. Through such a practice, I hope to return art to a space of coexistence, resonance, and mutual becoming with all things.
I am a lump of clay.
I have existed in this world for centuries.
I have endured landslides and thunderstorms, rested on mountains, soaked in rivers,
and slumbered deep within grasslands.
Flocks of sheep have trampled across me; ferns have rooted within me.
An unrecorded storm and an ancient avalanche tore me from stone veins
and swept me down a raging stream
to a bend along the riverbank.
There, I settled, cracked, and softened again.
I have witnessed the breath of the earth,
felt plants grow and insects hatch.
I have frozen in winter and disintegrated in spring.
Until one day,
a person dug me up with a metal spade
and sealed me inside a black plastic bag.
He said he was an artist.
He said, “I will use you.”
He brought me into his studio,
poured water into my body,
and kneaded me into many forms.
He said I had “potential,”
that he would “give me meaning,”
that he would turn me into a form “of significance.”
He shaped me into smiling faces, dolls, cups, and vases, but never asked what I wanted to become,
never wondered if I wanted to change.
He never considered my perspective.
My form, silent and compliant, became his.
But I have never needed meaning to be given.
My existence does not depend on human imagination.
My history precedes his hands.
My body carries the memory of riverbeds.
And I do not long to be named.
He placed me into the kiln,
burning me with flame,
trying to freeze me forever in his chosen meaning. When night fell and he was gone,
I cracked as I dried,
my spine stretched open,
my moisture evaporated from his world.
It was not collapse.
It was healing.
I never submitted to his hand—
I merely endured.
I am not your medium, your voice, or your project. I am clay, born of fire, rain, and stone.
I belong to this land, not to you.
If you speak with me, I will respond.
If you command, I will fall silent.
This is not my refusal to become art,
but my choice to coexist with it.
This is the co-existence of art and the world.
Bibliography
Rākete, E. (2016). In human: Parasites, posthumanism, and Papatuānuku. In course reader, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.