Come, replenish your starving bodies from a White chef, a White capitalist experience, and, most importantly a White dish. Spend your last dollars on this fun night out. Move the porcelain platter closer to the perfect angle where the light hits it just right. After all, we must post for the world to see. Everyone needs to witness the gatekept food that only the bourgeoisie can enjoy. I mean, if we can’t post it, the experience won’t taste as good. The food won’t dance along the tastebuds as much as it should. Hell, I didn’t buy just the food. I bought the commodity of the experience. I rented this white gold for a little under two hours, so I’ll be damned if I can’t present the white crown of clay to the world. They must see it. I want them to. What else am I, if not a consumer of White supremacy?
I’ve had a short life, half of which I was a mere adolescent looking to be nurtured. In the other half, I was a silent observer in academia, eagerly waiting to escape. Thankfully, the arts acted as that getaway. I can remember the high school dances where I’d retreat to capturing the night on a DSLR and the long winters I’d spend on the wheel. The rebellious phase, which I’m proudly still a part of, was spray-painting in San Diego and seemingly never finding the time to write about it. The concept of creation was always just a byproduct of my seminal tendency to observe. Alongside that foundation of noticing the unseen, undesired, or unsaid, I, like many of you, endured a country’s historical failures. Hence, I used to choose blissful ignorance. If it didn’t happen to me, it didn’t matter. It was selfish, but also conducive to staying afloat during a time when Black death cascaded through social media, pandemics shattered families, and the world continued to burn.
Indeed, it’s difficult to feel, but scarier not to feel at all.
There was not some particular moment when my life changed, rather it was a culmination of talking to genuine people, feeling like I was selling my identity for profit, sleeping on a couch for a year, and frankly, having a couple of mental breakdowns that led to change. While those are bottled conversations for a different day, the experiences altered the lens I chose to perceive the world through. As of late, I’ve noticed a familiar stench in the one medium I could always call home.
There is a hierarchy in clay and it’s oddly reminiscent of racialization in America. I don’t think one academic field can explore, nor justify, such a blanket statement. So, I’d like to implement several: rhetoric, psychology, color theory, and sociology to give a brief taste of a potentially endless field of study. I chose these fields as rhetoric demonstrates how we uphold this clay hierarchy, psychology and color theory can justify our colored associations within clay and race, and sociology elicits how society cyclically perpetuates this problem. I’ll also examine the work of a handful of potters and sculptors whose thematic concepts allude to this hierarchy.
While I believe some studio potters aim to dismantle parts of the clay hierarchy, I’m under the impression that the majority aren’t even aware it exists. I apologize if you anticipated a placid read, but I hope we’ll begin to cremate clay’s colonization.
Let’s begin with color and progressively zoom out.
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