Katherine Ross: Human and Non-human Interactions with Clay, 2013-2019

Katherine Ross: Human and Non-human Interactions with Clay, 2013-2019

The teacup serves as a point of fusion, a rotational concept, for my investigation of hybridity and obsolescence. The porcelain teacup had developed for use in the various tea rituals intrinsic to elite social hierarchies. It spread from there to broader social layers. As those elitist social structures have decomposed, the social role of the tea cup has essentially disappeared from contemporary culture. The once ubiquitous industrial production of bland and banal porcelain ware continues today as a flood of plastic and disposable utilitarian ware that chokes landfills and oceans. I have chosen to use this object because it is the ceramic equivalent of the mule, an obsolete pre-industrial revolution man-made hybrid.

In one video, the teacup and the mule signify a sort of ghost of their own histories. They perform a dressage dance interaction. The dance of the animate and the inanimate form the synergy of their obsolescence. A mule performs a piaffe (a calm, composed, elevated trot in place without forward movement) over a single unfired porcelain teacup and saucer. Eventually the cup will be trampled. The equine knows there is something underneath him. Not taught what to do with it, he tries to avoid it. Eventually the propulsion of the piaffe movement and the awkward attempts to avoid the cup causes him to lose track of where it is and he animates the inanimate at once by smashing it.

In another video a mule canters in a circle, round and round like the centrifugal movement of a potter’s wheel or a zoetrope. The mule’s revolutions, pace, and direction are guided by my voice. A porcelain cup in its path may be perceived as an obstacle or a predator. To the mule, a porcelain cup has no social meaning. The mule may decide to jump over it, go around it, ignore it, or attack it.

Interspecies collaborations in art are often one-sided collaborations. The human usually uses the other without using its decision-making abilities or eliciting active, volitional contribution to the project. Desiring a more full collaborative effort, I have allowed my mules unrestricted access to my studio to investigate ceramic materials and objects. They are curious animals and want to understand objects in their environment. Actually, it is a survival skill for them. Curiosity in equine species is a mechanism that enables them to understand their environment and to know what is safe and what is not.

For The Subjective Meadow several hundred, slip cast porcelain spheres, while still soft and pliable, were taken to the mules’ field. Placed in the open, the animals were free to investigate, sniff and push the spheres, distorting and leaving their marks as a record of their interaction. The resulting objects and video are hauntingly beautiful, and a quiet meditation on the possibilities for both understanding and relating to another species. Because their senses pick up on different things (a survival tactic), different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds (their Umwelt). Everything about a person or animal shapes the world it inhabits.In the performances, I instigate the situations but the mules decide what to do and how to finish it. Neither of us completely understand each other’s agenda, Umwelt, or intention but we have learned to trust each other when it comes to our reactions.

For Unseen and Misremembered, I stripped away all of the vegetation in the field by my barn and exposed the clay surface I have never seen. I strapped a camera under the belly of my mule and rode her all over that field. With every step the clay flew into the air. I replanted the field and don’t see the clay anymore.

I was given soil borings from downtown Chicago. Pipes driven 30 to 40 feet into the clay ground. Pipes filled with the clay to be tested before a skyscraper is built on top of it. We never see the exposed clay in Chicago.

Much of the natural world is concealed or obscured from us. We think we know. I think I know clay. I walk on the clay under my house and the clay under all of Chicago every day but it is unseen.

Encyclopedias were written to record and explain everything. Hundreds of years ago scientists travelled the earth in search of the unknown and unseen. One returned to France, hired an artist to draw the animals from his description for the encyclopedia he was writing. Misremembered or inaccurately explained, the artist drew the mule.

Collaborations between myself, the mules and teacups inaugurate a spontaneous, intuitive, and unpredictable studio production. This synergy is a new way for us to work to an unknown outcome. More broadly, what will remain after the collapse of all social, historical, and cultural relevance and reference to the mule, the teacup, and dressage is anyone’s guess. As our societies and art have moved from these social artifacts and interactions to a more conjugated meaning of life and art prefaced in the identity of self, our historical referents may falter or persevere.

Videos may be viewed here.

Photo captions (in order of appearance):

• Subjective Meadow, 2014, porcelain, installation dimensions variable
• Subjective Meadow (detail), 2014, porcelain, small sphere 4 x 4 x 4 inches, large sphere 20 x 20 x 20 inches
• Subjective Meadow (detail), 2014, porcelain, sphere 20 x 20 x 20 inches
• Subjective Meadow (detail), 2014, porcelain, sphere 14 x 14 x 14 inches
• Subjective Meadow (detail), 2014, porcelain, sphere 18 x 18 x 18 inches
• Subjective Meadow process still from video, 2013, mules and unfired porcelain
• Teacups and Mule, 2014, video still
• Piaffe, 2014, video still
• Unseen and Misremembered, 2019, unfired clay, wood, vinyl, digital print, video projection, size variable
• Unseen and Misremembered, 2019
• Unseen and Misremembered, 2019
• Unseen and Misremembered, 2019