Earthwork Projects

– by Nobuho Nagasawa

The year before I graduated from the Art Academy in West Berlin in 1984, I took the Trans-Siberian Railroad and traveled through Eastern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, and China and returned to Japan after a six year absence from home. Inspired by the sight of the Great Wall of China vanishing into the desert, I built a sculpture of a wall in Japan that would gradually return to the earth, unlike the Berlin Wall at the time.

This project “Noyaki” (1984) became my first earthwork that involved extensive physical labor, firing, and the bringing together of community. During the last of seven days of firing, a curious meteorological phenomenon occurred, which led to later projects associated with the atomic bomb. Because of the intense and prolonged heat caused by the firing, I altered the local weather patterns and brought rainfall, just like the Black Rain that fell the day after the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. Furthermore, the sculpture resonated with the wind. I realized that I had induced changes to the environment which were neither predictable nor controlled, and these surprises brought nature very close to my projects for the next few years.

In 1985 in Northern Italy, an earthen drum “Rain Drum” was created in nature. Focusing the sun’s energy through a magnifying glass, the firing of the drum began and continued for four days. After the firing, a canvas was stretched over the form. Only nature may decide when to drum, providing communication between humans and the heavens.

"Navel of the Earth" was my first reclamation project in 1985 in the ruin of a Jewish synagogue in Kreuzberg, a district of Berlin near the former Berlin Wall. My goal was to give new life to the earth that had been destroyed during World War II. Excavating the earth in Berlin was a dangerous endeavor. Bombs buried in the ground during the war could still detonate without warning. Needless to say, my proposal of excavating and burning the earth was intensely debated among the Jewish and German communities. The long process of gaining approval from the community and the city for the project became a "project" of its own. The debate was not only about the artwork, but also involved how to come to terms with the past in postwar Berlin. The following spring, the project was completed as life came back to the earth and the people embraced the site. The site still exists to this day as a community park in the reunited city of Berlin.

"Earthwork Process 7" was one of the major projects (and my seventh earthwork) that I completed during my residency at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1987. The goal was to work with the elements of nature, earth, air, water and fire. The material I used for the construction was an unfired green brick that I purchased from a local brick factory. I drilled eight holes on both top and bottom of each brick to increase the adhesion of the mortar (the same material that brick is made out of), and stacked the bricks until it left a very small opening on the top. The diameter of the tower is 16 feet in diameter (4x4=16, representing four elements of nature). The inside of the tower was painted with copper glaze, which was mixed with ocean water, and the tower was fired for four nights and five days continuously. This project attracted not only people from Cal Arts, but also a wide range of people from Los Angeles. It resulted in an event that involved several hundred people at its final stage, the four-day firing process.

In the fall of 1988, I was invited to create a site-specific project for the International Arts Festival in Ushimado, Japan. "Kiva" was an underground amphitheater (46 feet wide and 17 feet in depth) that also functioned as a sundial. By standing in the center of the "Kiva," your own shadow becomes the indicator of time. Dealing with the perception of nature, my goal was make environmental awareness more pertinent. The project explored the essentialness of the sun's energy to life and claimed for humans an integral part of the cosmic cycles. The highlight of this Festival was the performance of 82 year old Kazuo Ono, the founder of the Butoh dance, in the earthen theater. (The title "Kiva" refers to the Native American Anasazi underground ceremonial space.)

“Temple” was a brick structure in the form of a gateway, sited deep within a pecan grove. While walking through the masonry passageway, one can reclaim myth and travel in the land of imagination. In the summer months, the temple hides beneath a canopy of green, awaiting discovery.

Woodburn High School

– film by Daniel Frenkel & Chelsea Sprauer

Portable Cob

– story and photos (except where noted) by Janine Björnson

Last summer in Northern California, Cob went mobile. Cob has made its indelible stationary mark on the alternative building movement in the last decade, so it was time for it to show another face.

In the spirit of Portland Oregon’s City Repair Project, the first ‘Placemaking Project’ occurred in Santa Rosa last June 11th. The City Repair Project is group of citizen activists creating public gathering places and helping others to creatively transform the places where they live (see www.cityrepair.org). Directed by Joe Kennedy, the Junior College neighbourhood and the First Congregational United Church of Christ hosted; speakers, music, informational kiosks, and Samoan pig roast (wow!), all interwoven with the construction of an ephemeral plaza. The ephemeral plaza included a chalk intersection mandala and a cob bench.

The church was progressive enough to entertain the idea of a bench made of earth on its property, but they were not able to commit to a permanent location at the time. Therefore, the bench was called into existence but it didn’t have a home. How can we give the community this healing, playful experience of clay, sand, straw and water all gooshing between their toes without a place for it to live? Joe and I decided it was within in our reach to make a portable bench. This would meet everyone’s needs until the permanent location was chosen.

Joe and I worked together to design a basic wooden structure that a skilled volunteer could build. Made of 2x6’s, 2x4’s, Peter Crone made a strong, simple wooden foundation on wheels. It had all the necessary components: sturdy wheels that locked, eye bolts attached to the underside so it could be locked down in a specific location, a perimeter foundation made from 2x6 fir with 16d nails driven in to the top side to act as a keying element for the cob, and a seating area made from wood that would allow water drainage. It was a lovely little foundation on wheels 5’ long, 2 1/2’ feet deep and 16” high. It was a tiny bench that could be finished in one day. The bench would have a cob backrest and cob armrests.

The shape of the cob bench unfolded, as did the day. Our main criterion was to create a bench for the community that they could relate to. We did not want to alienate anyone with earth and straw, we wanted to make friends. Therefore, we chose a very simple design that resembled a conventional ‘loveseat’. Who can turn their back on love?

Thus, the cob loveseat on wheels was born. The proud builders gathered around their overstuffed creation at the end of the day to admire and celebrate this new face of cob. Cob on wheels! What next?

We were the last ones to clean up at the Placemaking Project therefore, there were only four of us to move the bench off the sidewalk and take it to another location to dry. Two men, two women, all fit and worthy, there we were hunched over this loveseat, hands on the foundation pushing with everything we had! IT WOULD NOT BUDGE.

1-2-3 Puuuuuuuuusssshhhhhh! Our little bundle of love was a wet hippopotamus and she didn’t want to move!

Fortunately, we are brainy group and managed to thread a garden hose through the undercarriage of the foundation, which acted as a pulling anchor. The four of us turned into horses and tugged until we had her going full of momentum and headed to her temporary home.

The lesson? Wet cob is much heavier than you can imagine. The glory?

The first portable cob bench!

For more information on the portable bench contact Janine at claybonesandstones@yahoo.ca.

Story originally printed in the Cobweb, Issue #22 Winter 2006

Always Becoming

– Story and photos (except where noted) by Bill Steen

This project, “Always Becoming,” was the winner of a competition sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian to create outdoor sculptures on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Artist Nora Naranjo Morse of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico who awarded the project, planned to create ephemeral sculptures out of natural materials that would slowly decompose over a ten-year period. Instead of aging or dying, the sculptures would be seen as “always becoming,” in the same spirit as Carl Jung who said, "In every adult there lurks a child—an eternal child, something that is always becoming, that is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education.”

Nora asked us, Athena and Bill Steen of The Canelo Project to oversee the project because of our expertise in natural building techniques – and because Nora is Athena’s aunt.

Construction started on the five tower-like forms that would stand anywhere from six to fifteen feet tall. In the month that followed, each sculpture was built by what might be called a creative collaborative effort. The sculptures unfolded and took form in response to the skills and talents of all those involved and the materials that were available in the area.

The core group that worked on the project was composed of Nora, ourselves and our children Benito, Arjuna and Kalin. We brought with us the Lopez Morales family of Obregon, Mexico with whom we have been close working partners since the mid ‘90s. They included seventy-some year old Juan Morales, his daughter Juanita and husband Emiliano and their 7-year-old son CheChe. Dax Thomas from Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico completed the crew filming the project for pod casts and a film. When not busy with his camera he could be found filling in wherever needed. The interface with the museum was nothing less than brilliant due to the museum’s project director Machel Monenerkit who seemed able to make anything happen that we needed—including providing us with two young helpers on a daily basis. Lastly, friends appeared to help us every day, from the around the country, and the world.

The D.C. area defined the primary materials we would use. There was an abundance of clay to be found, colors ranging from basic brown to beautiful yellow and red. The little straw we needed for plasters, cob and blocks was easily acquired from plant nurseries. Black locust poles were provided from one of the Smithsonian sites and bamboo came from the botanical gardens in Mt. Vernon and the Aerospace museum. Stone of all types, sizes and colors were easily found. A few bags of lime were needed for stabilizing clay in the foundations. All in all, it was a very simple palette of materials.

In many ways, working in the middle of Washington D.C. wasn’t much different than working at home or any of our other sites except for the Independence Avenue traffic and all the pedestrians. Informal, it had an unmistakable atmosphere of what a good friend once described as "family construction." Clearly our roped off areas were far different from other building sites in the downtown area.

Initially we had thought that cob would be one of our primary methods. We invited our friend Sasha Rabin of Seven Generations Natural Builders to help coordinate the cob effort. Cob is a mix of clay soil with some sand and straw that can be shaped and molded in place while wet. Sasha was very effective at including people in mixing the cob, inviting them to take off their shoes and hop around in the mud. Cob proved to be a fabulous material for people passing by, groups of school kids and museum employees.

We had never really considered making adobe-like straw/clay blocks because we did not think they would dry fast enough in the D.C. climate. To our surprise, they became a vital part of the process. Cob, a wet material, requires drying before more can be added and so cannot be built very high very fast. In contrast, the straw/clay blocks could be produced in volume and this made the work progress more quickly. The straw/clay blocks were a beautiful sight drying on the on the curving wall bordering the sidewalk and drew frequent comments from many Latins who were familiar with adobes.

Our other clay-based method was rammed earth, used for the central core of one of the sculptures. The striated colors of the different layers eventually disappeared waiting to be revealed again in the future when the outer shape of the sculpture fades away.

Most of the work with the poles and bamboo was done by our Mexican contingency. The bamboo was patiently split and used as lath in “wattle and daub” applications.

A month and a half later, Athena and I returned with Nora to apply finish plasters and clay paints. Each sculpture was treated differently when it came to deciding what type of stabilization would be used. One sculpture received none, others a treatment of diluted raw linseed oil, another got an emulsion of casein and linseed oil mixed with the plaster and the final one an application of a potassium silicate or waterglass sealant. The idea was not to make them totally resistant to the D.C. climate, but simply to slow the erosion process.

DC was a very different and satisfying way of working compared to having one person in charge. We were all continually changing roles and jobs. Sometimes it was directing others, sometimes working alone, partnering according to the needs of the day or providing the spark of insight needed to let a sculpture move to the next step. Everyone's role constantly shifted. Formal decision-making was secondary in importance to the movement and flow of the work. Perhaps one might liken it to the swarm behavior of birds, bees and ants.

In the end much had to do with how materials were combined into the mixes that were used. We kept everything simple, the result of 14 years working in Mexico, and Canelo with countless talented people. If there is anything that we've learned it is keeping the methods and materials matched to the people at work.

For a more in depth look at the project check out the pod casts that were created by young talented film maker Dax Thomas from Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico.

Cob Goes to Washington

– by Sasha Rabin

Have you ever had a moment when you see yourself from the outside, and what you see is a scene you never could have imagined– a scene in such sharp contrast with the rest of your life that it gives you pause? While mixing cob just off the Mall, with the Capitol behind us looking like a fake movie backdrop and our adobe blocks lined up to dry on the concrete wall, that feeling has been frequent. There are also a surprising number of moments when I find myself focused on mixing cob or making blocks and I forget entirely where I am. I could be at Canelo, or back home, or at any number of beautiful country locations. Then I am abruptly reminded where I am by the twelfth person that hour asking me what we are making. During the time I have been here my answers have dwindled from long explanations to simply "sculptures." The next question, of course: "sculptures of what?" "Abstract earthen forms" is the short answer, and from there I can say one of two things, depending whether their interest seems genuine and if I feel like talking. "We are building five sculptures out of all organic materials, two here and three over there. This one represents the female, with the phases of the moon here, mimicking the phases of the moon on the plaza" and I point to the moons the passersby are walking across that no one has noticed. "The three sculptures over there represent a family – a mom, a dad and a baby. Nora Naranjo-Morse is the artist, the woman over there in the bandanna." Or, if my patience for talking to strangers has completely given out, that's when I invite them to come join in, "anyone is welcome to help," and inevitably they all retreat.

Nora Naranjo-Morse was selected out of several applicants to build sculptures outside the National American Indian Smithsonian Museum. The title of the installation is Always Becoming. Nora is the aunt of Athena Steen of the Canelo Project, and I was lucky enough to be asked to come lend a hand with the cob, and whatever else needed doing. Working on the sculptures has been a wonderful way to expand the way I think about building and remind me of some of the most important aspect of natural building. Since the idea with these sculptures is that they are going to erode away over a ten-year period, we had to pay equal attention to all the layers, from the very core to the final finish. In many cultures where craftsmanship is valued more strongly than here, this attention to quality in unseen details is common. In the culture I am from, it is rare. This feels like a strand that I could benefit form weaving into all aspects of my life. The sculptures are intended to relate to the idea of permanence in much the same way as Tibetan sand paintings. The impermanent nature of the sculptures also served as a wealth of lessons and reminders, reminding me that all that we do and build in life is temporary, and the more fully I remember that, the better off I am.

The sculptures range from about eight to fourteen feet tall. Two of them were built over a tipi-like structure of woven bamboo, with intricate patterns that may someday be exposed, covered in a thick earthen plaster. One of the sculptures is all cob, one a combination of cob and adobe, and one mostly adobe with a rammed earth center column. We are using different materials to try to achieve different erosion patterns, knowing that some will erode faster and some slower, although I have a feeling that they will all erode slower than expected. We dug some of the clay directly from the site. Two of the sculptures are under a huge, very old tree, so the soil there is actually the original soil of the area. Their foundation holes had to be dug with a large air compressor to avoid damaging any roots. The rest of the soil we got from an excavation site down the road where a Sizzler is being built, and the sand came in from just outside the city. We were allotted a few parking spaces to store the materials. The main crew is Bill and Athena Steen, their sons Benito and Oso, Athena's Aunt Nora, and a wonderful Mexican family that Bill and Athena have worked with for years: Don Juan, Emiliano, and Juanita. The main construction is to be completed in five weeks, with some final plastering to come later.

It's been interesting to note all the different reactions from people who have never seen anything like this before. We have two little muddy work areas, surrounded by concrete on all sides. Many people pass by and don't even look our way, as if we are so far out of their reality that they can't see us. At other times I feel like an animal in a zoo. Most people ask their questions from the clean concrete, but sometimes a few join in the work. At times we have had a dozen kids mixing cob. In many people's minds the project inherently has some esteem because we are building it on Smithsonian ground, but you can tell that many don't understand what we are doing or why. I don't know that I can fully answer that question even for myself, except that sometimes in life you know that you need to do something, and you do it. So here I am, mixing cob in the middle of Washington, DC, surrounded by concrete, cars, motorcycles, and the government of the nation.

Often we don't know why we are doing something until much later, but some parts of the why are gradually becoming clear. I spend so much of my time being saddened by the actions our government and by the current global situation, while feeling helpless to do anything about it. Being part of this project, right in downtown DC, with the Capitol looming in the background, felt like something I could do to bring a bit of calmness and peace into the middle of the craziness and chaos. No matter how small or large an effect it may have, to me it has served as a good reminder to do what I can, and who knows what effects the ripples from our actions my have down the road.

Sasha Rabin lives in Arizona and teaches cob and natural building workshops with Seven Generations Natural Builders. Email her at . If you want to see some podcasts that were made about the project described in this article, click here.

Cob in the park

– story and photos by Georgie Donais

I cannot remember the exact moment when I first learned about cob. I do know that when I came across a description of a building material composed of sand, straw and clay, all my senses took notice.

I can still feel the sense of anticipation, of being about to quench a deep thirst, as I began to contemplate the possibilities of cob in my life. That thirst was a desire to build, and was something that had been only partially quenched in all those years of helping my dad build our house, or of doing sewing projects on my own.

As I realized the malleability of cob, I understood then that I had been missing the ability to sculpt and mold, to shape, consider, and shape again, until the creation felt right. I also understood the subversive nature of using the very dirt beneath my feet to build, leaving me beholden to no one for my shelter besides the earth herself. Only a generation before, those in my family had been intimately connected to the earth, digging in the dirt to grow their food, and living in houses made of sod. I could feel the re-enlivening of my connection to my immediate history and to my history as a human being. This sense continues to grow.

My first couple of projects were done mostly solo, allowing me to understand the breadth of work and organization involved. It quickly became clear to me, however, that cob was something best done with friends, and was ideally suited as a medium for community engagement. Research showed me that it was being used all over North America in this way, and that there were plenty of models I could follow.

It is my incredible good luck to live down the street from Dufferin Grove Park, in downtown Toronto, Ontario. This fourteen acre oasis of green has itself been a model of citizen involvement, a place where people’s gifts are nurtured to fruition by parks department staff, and volunteers. The park hosts a giant sand pit, children’s playground and wading pool, basketball courts, a skating rink, masonry ovens, a farmers’ market, Friday night suppers, several theatre and dance festivals, native plant gardens, a lot of green space, and summertime shade from mature Norway Maples. It was to this mix that I proposed to add community built earthen courtyard wall for the summer of 2005.

First I set about winning over the park’s advocate, Jutta Mason, with drawings and descriptions, as well as with inspiring pictures of cob walls, benches and houses that I had seen on the web. She suggested that I may have lost my toque if I thought that I could entice a hundred people to come and work for free, squishing mud with their feet to build something they didn’t even own. Two hundred, I assured her, with bravado. Cob in the Park was born.

Once we had completed the process of gaining permissions, we got to work. I designed the wall in broad terms, set the footprint, and started amassing materials. Our first foundation dig attracted thirty enthusiastic people, many of whom kept coming back until the rubble trench was laid and the urbanite foundation puzzled together and mortared. Several core volunteers emerged as well, guiding aspects of the project and offering me extra help where necessary. I also had recreation department staff support: one person helped me direct the build; and another minded the children of any adult who wanted to help out, but whose children did not. That included my children, who quickly tired of cob but who enjoyed playing in the playground, wearing the yellow t-shirts that signified them as cob kids.

A sandwich board advertising free, ongoing, no fee, no sign up, no commitment earthen building workshops was out most days and most daylight hours. The wall rose steadily, taking the general shape I had forecast, but influenced and enhanced by the individual wishes and interests of workshop participants. Each day, more people came, eventually counting more than 500 attendees. Even the plumbers and electricians, used to straight lines, studs and drywall, seemed beguiled by the project, and we made good friends of several of them.

While we were working, I’d often pause to hear the sounds of cob construction: laughter, silence, conversation, more laughter. It was the sound of a community inventing itself, through the quiet, shared work of cobbing. That they could hear each other and not be drowned out in the din of saws and hammers was, to me, revolutionary. That they could all be involved in building, regardless of age, size, ability, amount of free time or cash flow, was subversive in the best way. That all these people could now imagine creating their own shelter from the dirt beneath them, with their own hands and feet, was the best gift I could ever offer them. Sharing this knowledge and work was, with the exception of having children, surely the single most soul-nurturing experience of my life to date.

By the time the summer ended, the kitchen and baby-changing stations were operational. The cooking fireplace was a smoky work of art, the green roof was sprouting barley, the cedar shakes were installed, and the mosaics and lime plaster were completed. With the project wrapped up and the celebration party over, I cried often, and skulked around the wall until it snowed, finishing off details and inventing things to do while my kids played in the park.

The next year, Cob in the Park started a new project in the park: a composting toilet that would provide much needed toilet facilities to the children’s playground. Sheltered by a cob building with an earthbag foundation, the toilet would convert human waste into valuable compost for use on the park’s many ornamental gardens. Permissions were obtained and construction started, using the same principles of free, open participation as before. However, some neighbours were determined that there be no more earthen building in the park, much less something as scandalous as a composting toilet. Their complaints delayed the project and halted its progress by the end of summer 2006. More money has now been spent on architects and engineers than will be spent to build the structure, but I remain determined to finish the project, thereby dragging Toronto kicking and screaming towards a slightly more sustainable future.

To keep our spirits up, much to the annoyance of the afore-mentioned neighbours, Cob in the Park has led the creation of a number of benches in the park, enlisting school children in what has been described as “the best field trip ever”. (Making their own pizza at the bread ovens was included in the trip, which might have something to do with the enthusiasm as well.)

We are also supporting the creation of cob structures in other parts of the city, lending our expertise to schools and parks that are trying to make participatory art in their localities. This too, is the subject of pushback, as authorities find reasons to disallow this most ancient but unheard of art forms. But people are resilient, and I am confident that, once they get a taste for working with earth, it will be hard for authorities to dissuade people through simple obfuscation. The earth can wait a long time.

Introduction & afterword: art is...

– by Kiko Denzer

Art is many things, but here what I mean by “art” is that kind of experience by which humans learn.

Working with mud, sand, and straw is a way to teach geology, engineering, physics, history, drawing, composition, and design. It is also a way to teach social skills, like cooperation. But more important than just what it teaches is how it teaches:

Jon Young is a wilderness educator who takes kids into the woods, and teaches them to identify and track wildlife, among other things. He cites Microsoft research suggesting that tracks in the mud were an original source of writing, that alphabets are like birdprints, and that reading a set of tracks, from a brain science point of view, is the same as reading a bunch of symbols written on a page in ink.

He also says the kids who do best are those labelled “ADD,” or “Attention Deficit Disorder,” who are too wound up to sit still, but who can develop total focus on a set of tracks because the tracks require them to move. The excellence they develop for this kinetic reading reliably transfers into the classroom, where their grades improve. Young concludes that kids don’t have “learning disorders,” schools have teaching disorders.*

As an occasional “artist-in-residence” in schools and other public settings, I’ve come to much the same conclusion. I gave one second grade class some simple drawing exercises. All the kids set to work. I stood back and watched, waiting for the rare question. The teacher stood next to me appreciatively, and asked if she could make some copies of the exercises. “The only time they’re ever this quiet is when we do art,” she said.

I was too stunned to ask the obvious question: “why not do more art?” But it occurs to me now that part of the problem is that art is treated as a separate subject, rather than as a method.

As method, art is simply a way of learning that requires greater physical involvement than reading and writing. And while it can be done at a desk, it gains force with greater involvement.

For example: at a treatment center for at-risk youth, I and the writer working with me were warned that it was “one of those days,” and we might have to cut short our session due to behavior problems. We were building a model village, out of earth. The kids had drawn designs for their houses, developed stories about the characters who lived in them, mixed mud, and roughed out the homes on 2x2 foot pieces of plywood. Only finish work remained.

The kids lined up, single file, military formation, for the hundred yard silent walk to our “shop.” An extra adult or two (for a total of 4 or 5) ensured adequate supervision for 7 kids.

They arrived and set to work in palpable quiet and concentration. Gregg and I attended occasional calls for help or materials, or technical discussions about design and engineering. One of the most sullen kids volunteered a positive remark.

Staff were amazed at what seemed to them a remarkable transformation. I was amazed that what was obvious to me seemed hidden to them: we were engaging the students in something outside themselves. Rather than trying to “control negative behaviors” we had engaged them in a positive, collaborative effort to achieve a shared goal.

Unfortunately, in the field of public health, and as a socio-economic category, “youth” is often associated with disease, and not just in “treatment centers.” Violence, drugs, alcohol abuse, and fear are daily fare at school, and even healthy kids who exhibit “negative behaviors” are evaluated to see if they’re “at risk,” as though early diagnosis will prevent infection.

It seems to me that art, as a method, is a healthier preventative that accepts reality as it is rather than trying to deny it. Finding and claiming beauty, which can be done even in the midst of war, is a fundamentally positive act that helps unite a fragmented world, and makes sense of harsh and confusing realities.

As Wendell Berry writes: “When all the parts of the body are working together, are under each other’s influence, we say that it is whole; it is healthy. The same is true of the world, of which our bodies are parts. The parts are healthy insofar as they are joined harmoniously to the whole.…”+

Art helps join us, harmoniously, to a whole. It is a way to understand our place in the world. That it has become, too often, a rarified expression of some unique individual vision is, I think, evidence of fragmentation, not art. But if we look a bit deeper, we find art in every basic activity of everyday life.

John Wesley Powell put it another way that makes immense sense to me. He said, “the greater part of knowledge is always preceded by generations of doing.”* Powell explored the Colorado River before it was tamed, and knew and respected the way that native peoples lived in harmony with land, life, and other creatures. At the start of the 20th century, he wrote that phrase to introduce Frank Hamilton Cushing’s classic ethnographic study, Zuñi Breadstuff.

Powell called Cushing “a man of genius” because as a teenager, he had learned from indigenous sources all the skills needed to transform the stuff of wilderness into the stuff of civilization — tools, vessels, shelter, clothing. His manual skill became the basis of immense scholarship, won him membership and a place of leadership in the Zuñi tribe, and made him into a teacher of future generations, a conduit for the re-creation of culture – all based on simple acts of doing.

By contrast, when I was a kid interested in stone-carving, I found materials in art shops and bought small chunks of cut stone off metal shelves. What I couldn’t buy was a fundamental knowledge of the essential wholeness that any art tries to express: the forces and landforms that made stone and quarry, the taste and sources of water filtered by layers of ancient rock, or the human stories that linked me, my stone, chisels, and the animal shapes I made, to the rest of my world.

Though I loved the doing of it, “being an artist” seemed shallow and dull. “Success” meant selling stuff to strangers. The reward was just money. Artists were middlemen, trapped by things that had nothing to do with art: the “market,” galleries, critics and collectors. Where was the joy of doing what I loved? Meaning and beauty? Inspiration and communication? I turned cynical, and abandoned art as cut off from people, place, beauty, culture.

Working with earth for the past ten years, however, has changed me. Everywhere I step is a quarry. Everywhere I dig, I build relationships. The result is not sculpture or architecture, but home: beauty that I share by inhabiting. When ethnologists call pottery one of the first indications of human civilization they are merely naming the obvious — when we shape the earth, we shape ourselves.

I felt this wholeness long before I knew or began to work for it as an idea – and I had work at it for a while before I understood it. First, I started to garden, and to eat from my garden. Then I knew – by my hands – that I came from the earth. When I started to work with kids, I knew by experience that the act of making is more important than the thing made, or the maker.

Recently, a friend asked me to make a container for the ashes of her late husband, Jack. Being a sculptor and not a potter, I offered to contain the ashes in the material itself — to mix earth and ash, and make them into something that would be “beautiful to look at and friendly to live with.”

She said yes, and delivered a small plastic box. Inside was a plastic bag containing a few pounds of bone-grey gritty ash. There’s not much left after a body is incinerated (a process requiring thirty gallons of propane — enough, at our house, to cook our meals for 6 months!) The bulk of the tissues — primarily carbon, nitrogen, and water — all return to the air to be re-synthesized by green plants. The part that comes from the earth goes back to the earth looking alot like sand and grit.

Familiar as I am with sand and grit, this was Jack going through the screen that I used to separate coarse from fine particles. He watched me from a photo on the wall as I worked. It slowed me down. It seemed disrespectful to just let bits fall on the floor, so I was careful not to drop bits; I paid extra attention.

Materials speak. They tell you what they can and can’t do. Sand varies according to the mountains it’s made from, how it’s worked by weather and water: rain, stream, river, or ocean. Ash has qualities too, peculiar to its sources and the river of time and technology that carries it through life and death and back to life. Jack’s ashes behaved differently than sand — felt different, stuck to and pulled differently on the trowel, differed in how it came to the surface when polished, how it reflected light….

All the time, I had in mind that this was Jack.

Then I remembered what the red men tried to tell the white men who demanded the right to buy and own their land: how can we sell you the bones of our fathers and mothers, the bodies of our children? Land, people, life are all one — a gift from a generous creator, and one that finally returns to its source.

A shovel feels different now. I dig with respect; I pay attention.

William Morris suggested that the highest duty of the artist is to make a beautiful home. I don’t know if he meant a house and garden, or if he meant home in the larger sense of our place on earth, but my wife and son and I share a small house in a large garden which feeds us vegetables and beauty. A few years ago, planting and fertilizing and eating out of my own garden for the first time, I realized that my purpose is to make compost — to go back to the ground that grew me. As obvious as that may seem to read, it took a couple cycles of doing before it became tangible enough for me to know that my small part is worth doing, to feel the comfort and confidence that my life will have value when I die, that somehow, it will be in harmony with others – animal, plant, soil.

All of this reassures me that art is not a thing, it’s the who and how and why of all my making: not “pieces” and exhibits and money, but children and relationships and home and family and community and neighborhood and citizenship – including taxes paid (or not, because a garden isn’t taxable)….

Kathleen Norris writes that “there is but one creator, and ‘creating’ is the very thing that artists cannot do. The gifts of the human imagination that artists employ operate equally in science and scholarship, teaching and philosophy, business and mathematics, ranching, preaching, engineering, mothering and fathering.” She goes on to suggest that the goal of art may just be for the artist to “come to a mature understanding of their communal role.”++

Mud has given me a communal role, because it invites participation and promises pleasure as well as beauty. By simplifying the doing of art, mud offers a direct and simple connection to wholeness – a wholeness that seems to me more durable than bronze or marble.


NOTES:
* Interview with John Young, by Christina Bertea, in Newvillage Magazine, no. 3, 2002, p. 60.
+ from The Unsettling of America
** In the Foreword to Frank Hamilton Cushing’s classic exploration of Zuñi food and culture, Zuñi Breadstuff, Heye Foundation, 1920, p. 13-15.
++ The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris, Riverhead Books, NY, 1997. Norris is a poet who, among other things, works as an artist-in-residence teaching poetry to children in public schools in South Dakota.