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Crack 2.0: The Art-Making Process

Welcome to the world of pottery and ceramics! Pottery is the art of creating forms out of clay and firing or drying them to maintain their desired structure. This ancient art form has a great history and the earliest records of pottery production date back as far as 16,500-14,920 years ago (Violatti, 2014). As the art form developed, three main types of pottery emerged: earthenware, stoneware and porcelain (Savage, 2020). I had the opportunity to work with stoneware and I’ll be sharing more on the process behind one of my graduation show artworks, Crack 2.0 (2019), as well as estimating its carbon footprint.

Crack 2.0 explores the stretching and manipulation of the clay medium. To expand on this concept, I made fifteen small discs out of stoneware clay and stretched them by pushing them inwards with my thumbs. The pieces were then bisque fired to a temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius in an electric kiln. After the first round of firing, I glazed them with a layer of red iron oxide to emphasise the cracks created. Finally, the work was sent for one last round of glaze firing. Here is the finished work!

Close up of “Crack 2.0” (2019)

My artwork “Crack 2.0” (2019)

How wasteful do you think this process is? While I could not find any statistics on stoneware, I was able to find some data on the carbon footprint of earthenware. From moulding, to firing and glazing, the footprint of producing one 10 X 10 X 10 cm earthenware piece adds up to around 1.22kg of carbon dioxide (Quintero et al, 2014). The total volume of my artwork is approximately 375 cubic centimetres (fifteen 5 X 5 X 1cm pieces). Assuming both stoneware and earthenware have similar properties, the carbon footprint of Crack 2.0 would be 0.458kg!

If you’re wondering what the 2.0 in the artwork title refers to, here’s where it comes into play. Ten of the original pieces in this series were remade from scratch due to a change in artistic direction, so an extra 0.305kg of carbon dioxide should be included!

Although there are limitations to my estimates (for example, how different the carbon footprint for stoneware may be in comparison to earthenware), what the calculations do show is that even producing the smallest ceramic works can have a large impact on the environment. As wasteful as pottery and ceramics may be, there are still ways we can reduce our environmental impact. Some things we can do include sealing unused clay properly so that it does not dry out, recycling unwanted clay works that are in their wet or greenware (unfired) stage, firing multiple clay works in batches to maximise the kiln’s use and pouring excess glaze back into the container to reduce wastage. With these in mind, let’s continue to create art sustainably and I hope this has opened your eyes to another unique art form!

 

References

Violatti, C. (2014). Pottery in Antiquity. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.ancient.eu/pottery/.

Savage, G. (2020). Pottery. Encyclopedia Brittanica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/art/pottery.

Quintero, P. et al. (2014). The Carbon Footprint of Ceramic Products. Assessment of Carbon Footprint in Different Industrial Sectors, 1, 113-150. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-4560-41-2_5#:~:text=The%20carbon%20footprint%20of%20the,of%20the%20total%20carbon%20footprint.

8 Comments

  1. Hey Sarah-Ann!
    This is really interesting, I never considered the environmental impacts of art before! Just curious, is it harder to do those more sustainable practices you mentioned than the normal process? And are these practices well-known in the art community?

    – Anna 🙂

    • Sarah-Ann Tham

      October 12, 2020 at 12:15 am

      Hi Anna, thanks for dropping by my blog! Other than the clay recycling practice that I mentioned (which would require some sophisticated equipment), most of the other practices I listed in this post are relatively simple to carry out. Take for example the sealing of clay: After putting the clay into a bag, twist the bag a few times and tuck the twisted end under the weight of the clay. This would be enough to keep the clay moist for a long time and the bag can just be untied if you want to use it again. Personally, I’m not too sure about the rest of the art community, but when I was in art school, the teachers often emphasised how important these practices were so that we don’t waste (expensive) materials, so in the context of my school community, these were definitely well-known. Hope that answers your question!

  2. Ceramics are some of my favourite artform, thanks for dismaying me Sarah 🙁

    As someone who has had an art exhibition (during my art O’ Level days) and experienced the need to prepare everything as perfectly as possible for that single event (even remaking some parts entirely), I’m curious now about how wasteful I was during those times and if I could have done anything better.

    That got me thinking, knowing what you know now, would you make any changes to your creation process? Or maybe even change the concept to be more sustainable? Would you take the sustainability of the material into consideration when creating a new artwork now?

    • Sarah-Ann Tham

      October 13, 2020 at 3:04 pm

      Hi Rachel, thanks for the question! If I had to rework some things during my art creation process, it would have been to solidify my concept more and get a clearer picture of what I wanted to do before I actually started working on the piece. Personally, I felt that I would not have had to remake these parts if I spent more time considering what I actually wanted to achieve with this work and it would have cut down the amount of clay I wasted on the first version too. Something else I would have done would have been to change up my concept to something more sustainable and I would have probably tried to work with recycled materials since I had the time to explore during the earlier stages of creation.

  3. Divina Vicknesh

    October 13, 2020 at 3:29 pm

    Hey Sarah!
    I find your artwork “Crack 2.0” really cool and it was really interesting that you calculated the carbon footprint of your artwork!
    I was in the ceramics club in my primary school and I too, like Rachel, remember being wasteful. I don’t remember thinking about the environmental impacts of the artform at all!
    I was reading about sustainable techniques we could adopt such as washing our tools in a bucket of water and then collecting the sludge that settles at the bottom to use as clay again, while using the top water to clean our work space!
    Do you think it would be a good idea for instructors in schools to highlight the potential environmental impacts of art and teach their students methods that would enable them to be less wasteful? What about incorporating environmentalism in the entire art syllabus as well? I think that would make for a really cool class!

    The post I was reading: https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/daily/ceramic-art-and-artists/ceramic-artists/three-helpful-tips-operating-sustainable-pottery-studio/

    • Sarah-Ann Tham

      October 13, 2020 at 10:55 pm

      Hi Divina, I think it would be great if instructors in schools start to highlight the environmental impacts of art and I believe that this is an important step as art is a very wasteful industry. Seeing that environmental aspects (e.g climate change) have are already beginning to be incorporated into the mainstream syllabus of some subjects like geography and chemistry, I think the same can be done for arts education too. When I was in art school, some teachers did emphasise that we should not waste resources and it’s great! If more teachers could start doing this, students can also learn about what they can do and start to play their part in environmental awareness. Thank you for the interesting comment!

  4. I’m just loving this blog ! And in this post, you took my feedback and did exactly what I suggested (use some primary lit). This is great stuff.

    One of my favourite things about your blog is seeing your artwork – in this case, it’s so abstract that it leaves room for me to make up all kinds of stories about what it represents.

    I’m quite amazed by the diversity of visual-art talents in this class. It would be so awesome if a bunch of you were to work together on creating something.

    • Sarah-Ann Tham

      October 14, 2020 at 10:42 pm

      Hi Dr Coleman, I’m glad that you love my art. You’ll definitely get to see more of it in future posts! While I do have my own rationale for the works I create, viewers are free to interpret it however they like (it’s art after all). Some of my friends even thought that the pieces in Crack 2.0 were supposed to be Chinese dumplings. A BES art collab sounds really interesting, maybe I’ll consider it!

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