Clay

Abstract

What is the ontologizing effect of a care framework? And how can clay cease to insist on itself as an abstracted medium of self-making? The artists Jade Montserrat, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, and Cassils each work clay as a material in their performance. Their toil of working with this organic material signals to the work of self-care as maintenance and ecological maintenance, a sign of the forces of reproduction that may befall marginalized people and communities within the collective care of the earth. Drawing up an analysis of the maintenance work of these three clay performances, this article builds toward an ecocritical framework that takes account of the literal dimensions of what might otherwise fall into the trappings of an abstract, conceptual affinity. That is, existing as conceptually closer to nonhuman nature carries duties and responsibilities, labor and toil, burdens of care, self-care, maintenance, and the sweaty, untidy, unraveling, by nature always unfinished work of recovery. The article explores a notion of transactional care, asking after the distributed ontologizing effect, the widened field of enclosure, and the matrices of legibility that earth-care paradigms might afford.