It has been an unusually mild summer on Wadawurrung Country and the local seaberry saltbush (rhagodia candolleana) has been giving an abundance of small reddish-pink berries.
Their vibrant colour is ‘fugitive’ when mixed with wet sloppy clay – meaning it mellows and fades. This impermanence has taught me much about the nature of time … and the time of nature - how everything is mattering and in flux.
The knobbly club rush (ficinda nodosa), from garden pruning, is curious. The stems with a knobbly end dry in ringlets while the grass stems dry hollow and strong.
Clay weaving is a practice of experiencing how matter matters and an examination of human respect and kinship with materials. It is an invitation to challenge learned anthropocentric behaviours such as using, expecting, owning, mastering and regarding the world a resource. Clay weaving is an opportunity to enjoy the here and now and to experience letting go of the sense of comfort that comes with permanence and control.
It is an opportunity to wonder what the world might look like if we could conceptualise ourselves – the human – as completely entangled in a world of mattering materials.
