Cooked Earth: Ambivalence in Terracotta

Terracotta—literally “cooked earth” from the Latin terra cocta—is a clay-based earthenware ceramic, porous and often unglazed. From the Terracotta Warriors, the approximately 7,000 individually crafted, life-sized ceramic warriors discovered in the mausoleum complex of Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China who ascended to the throne in 247 BCE,¹ to the façade of the London Natural History Museum, terracotta has a venerated place in art and architecture history. Simultaneously, it is a fundamentally commonplace and domestic material, as many cultures’ ongoing traditions of culinary and other household vessels demonstrate.² Today, in Canada, terracotta is primarily synonymous with building materials, with the majority of clay production in the manufacturing of brick, block, and tile.³

Although most clay is mined by openpit methods, artists working with terracotta in artisanal, land-based, site-responsive, and community-informed practices might enable us to complicate our rudimentary understandings of extractivism. Work by Bosco Sodi, Dana Prieto, Krista Belle Stewart, and Andrey Guaianá Zignnatto navigates the complexities of artisanal extraction and co-production, containment and porosity, transposition of land, and cyclical rituals of return.

Llano Grande, Oaxaca, Mexico

In a field of palm trees, a chestnut horse grazes wet grass among the crisscrossed tire tracks that hold muddy remnants of rain. The cross-hatched rain pools reflect the palm fronds above. Nearby, a young worker cleaves the clay soil from a small embankment, chipping it with a small metal hoe. Another worker sifts coarse sand into a wheelbarrow, and then deftly manoeuvres it, barefoot, through puddles. The sand is cast on top of the clay soil, now piled knee-high on the ground, and the two are folded together with deft swings of the hoe. Water is poured on top and the mixture is worked. Clay takes shape—or rather, clay emerges: a mass, a primordial nonshape. The worker cleans the clay-covered hoe blade, sliding the length of his index finger along one side of the blade and then the other, casting the clay remains onto the pile with nearly imperceptible flicks of his wrist.

The horse is now harnessed to a felled tree trunk, itself lashed to another with rope, this one upright inside a repurposed metal barrel. The horse walks slow circles around the barrel, wood creaking, churning the clay that squeezes out the open bottom as the workers add more of the soil and sand mixture