Wild clay - digging up pots

The connection between what is under our feet and the clay we use everyday in our pottery studio is not often observed so on a dry December day on the East coast of Yorkshire it felt like it was time to start.

A tidal land slide had washed chunks of clay onto the sandy beach, the clay was hard, dry, crumbly and very dark in colour. I harvested some large pieces that had broken away from the sea wall and added in some salty sea-water to keep it from drying out.

Fraisthorpe beach, Wild Clay

Clay landslide into the sand

After carrying it around in my car boot over the Christmas period it was time to process. I had no previous experience in working with ‘Wild clay’ but knew I needed to clean it for any stray rocks and get it into a state that was useable to shape.

I started by crumbling the clay as much as possible into a big bucket. Once I was confident there were no large lumps I decided to re-hydrate the clay, leaving it for a few weeks in an even bigger bucket of water. I checked back a few days later, the clay had really broken down and absorbed a lot of the water.

Time to mix. I felt like it was time to mix as I knew I could always dehydrate further - mixing was a hard going process, eventually I got it to the point where I could stir it through a sieve.

I should add that this was very manual and I was PETRIFIED of finding some sort of fossilised bugs/fishes/anything?! In reality I found nothing, not even a single pebble. It was very pure clay with little grit after it had been processed.

Unprocessed clay

Such dark clay, with no idea what colour the fired ceramics will be.

Once I got it to the point where it could be formed into a large mass, I put it into an old pillow case and allowed it to hang to dry out slightly. This took 3 days and gravity did a lot of the work!

I shaped some tiny pinch pots to see if it was workable and it was! Super dark in colour still and very smooth. I noticed quickly that it felt like it had more memory that normal purchased clay and cracked easily.

We fired on the normal bisque setting and I fired using a cookie just incase something terrible happened… nothing terrible happened!

Hey presto! Out came a perfectly fired, bright orange wild clay pot - dug and processed with my bare hands.

The finished bisque fired clay

The experience really made me feel such a deeper connection with what is around us and how it really is as simple as digging, processing and firing. EASY PEASY! It made me think of the thousands of years ago when people must have made everything using local clay and brought it all back down to earth. If we give to the environment it will give back in abundance.

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch or add a comment below!

Fired pinch pot