Diggin' Durham: Using clay from my yard

Wild clay

photos by Robert Chou Photography

I am on a slow journey of unearthing the beauty under my feet. I dig the soil in my own yard in Durham, North Carolina. Like the soil in much of North Carolina, it is full of clay. This is the story of that clay and me.

For years I made pottery using only store-bought clay. It’s convenient, reliable, and ready to use right out of the bag. I have made my own glazes for years, but never my own clay. Then, as my husband and I expanded our home garden, we encountered an abundance of clay each time we dug somewhere in our small urban yard. All this clay makes for tiresome work as a gardener. As a potter, it means an endless supply of materials without leaving home. I figured I would refine some of this clay and give it a test run in the studio.

Raw clay and soil dug from the yard.

The process of turning wild clay from the yard into workable clay in the studio takes time and labor. I let the chunks of clay dry out, then saturate them in a bucket of water so they will break down into a mud soup. I run this soup through an old window screen to remove the many rocks and twigs and roots and leaves. This partially refined clay mix gets passed through a finer sieve, this time to remove sand and smaller rocks. At this point I have a very watered down clay mix that needs time to dry. Over several weeks or months I let it settle out, siphoning the water off the top, and gradually drying into a pudding-like clay slip. I finish drying the clay a few pounds at a time on a plaster slab, letting the clay firm up to a workable consistency.

The first time I tried using this clay, I was surprised at how easy it was to work with on the potter’s wheel. It is supple and smooth with a tiny bit of fine grit. It feels similar to working with store-bought clay. In the kiln, my yard clay fired to a rich orange-red with a subtle texture from the fine sand left in there. It fires well at cone 04, the terra-cotta or “earthenware” temperature I use for firing my favorite store-bought red clay. I think it could even hold its shape at a higher temperature, although I prefer the vivid colors found at this lower temperature.

So, if this labor-intensive yard clay is so similar to store-bought clay, why bother? Indeed the 60 cents I pay per pound of clay at the store is a steal if you consider the labor cost of digging and refining each pound of yard clay. One practical reason is that using packaged clay requires the transportation of minerals from all over the globe to create that specific, reproduceable blend. Once the clay is bagged and boxed, it is a heavy material to truck from the warehouse to the store to my studio. In contrast, the carbon footprint of my yard clay is only the size of the energy needed to power my wheel and kiln.

The bigger reason for me, however, is the story that this clay of mine tells: the geologic formation of the land from which it comes, specifically the Durham Triassic basin. No one else can make pottery with clay that exact color or same subtle texture. It is terroir in the truest since. It’s like wine made from grapes grown on a specific plot of land; it carries the imprint of the minerals in that soil, the path the sun takes across the sky, and the microclimate of that one hillside. Clay, too, carries the imprint of its terroir. Clay that is mass-produced and packaged is like wine made from grapes sourced all over the world and then blended for specified end-product. It ensures consistency but prohibits variety.

The clay I dig may differ in various parts of the yard. It may change over time. As in improvisation, the magic is in seeing the variance and working with it. Maybe this process is my therapeutic attempt at learning to adapt to change. If there’s something 2020 is trying to teach me, it is to hold expectations lightly. I’m trying to give myself the space to be more experimental in the studio. I want to test out using more materials from my yard. Could the fallen branches in my yard become ash glazes or fuel for pit firing? Could I ball mill the sand I remove from the clay to make it into silica for glazes? I could spend a year just testing these possibilities. I wouldn’t even have to leave my less than 1/4 acre yard.

I would be honored to have you follow along on this journey. Maybe you would like a tiny piece of Durham for yourself? You can find pottery made from 100% wild clay dug in my yard right here in my online shop.