Making kin with Wild fire
			

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A Relational Design Practice

avi farber

Making Kin With Wild Fire
A Relational Design Practice

By Avi Farber
BA Philosophy, Bates College, 2012
Supervisor: Keith Doyle

A Thesis Support Paper Submitted In Partial Fulfillment Of The
Requirements For The Degree Of Master Of Design (Interdisciplinary)
Emily Carr University of Art + Design 2021
© Avi Farber 2021

Cover: Cimarron Canyon, New Mexico.
35mm film from the Ute Park Fire. 2018. Avi Farber

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Table of Contents

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Abstract
Thank You
Project Map
Land Acknowledgment
Introduction

11 Part One
12 On Place, Belonging, Relations, Land
20 Clay As Connector
27 Part Two
28 Machines and Meaning
38 Part Three
39 With Fire
46 Emerging from Ruins
52 Works Cited
54 Image List
55 Photo Stories
56 Berry Creek, California
65 Making 3D Pots

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Abstract

Standing next to trees as they are consumed by living swirls of heat during a wildfire
will make you quickly realize the precarity of your own position. This feeling only deepens after walking past melted microwaves while surveying towns impacted and transformed by this
unyielding force. This sense of imbalance between the sites we live in and how we choose to
inhabit them is hard to ignore. Yet, away from the fire, the material culture that contributes
to this disjunction continues uninterrupted. The objects we use everyday affect the world we
live in. This thesis project is about coming to see where we are, how we live, and using objects
as storytellers to transfer meaning from this unique place of relations. It is about imagining
ways of making that can reknit ways of living. Ways of being tied to the land.
I make 3D printed ceramic flasks—vessels made with foraged clays that undergo a
transformation, an interaction, as they are vitrified by wildfires. These functional objects are
experiments in ways of making that care for the interconnected web of relationships that the
objects we put into the world have. Can we co-design collaboratively with natural forces? Can
we craft with wildfire? Can we expand our understanding of kinship and use this inclusivity
to re-tool our design practices in order to reconsider who, how, and what we are designing
for? The hope is that these vessels carry new ways of seeing and an imperative for new ways
of acting. This ongoing project is a personal one, consisting of material assemblages that
share parts of my relationships with the places I am making in and the more-than-human
actors that I am in conversation with—the wind, the clay, the robots, and of course the fire.

Keywords
Relationality, Wildfire, Ceramics, 3D Printing, Indigenous
Knowledge, Philosophy of Technology
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Thank You

Arriving in Vancouver and realizing that it is a city and not a town was
quite a shock. My graduate school experience was not at all what I expected. It
has been challenging and rewarding in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and I have
many people to thank for their help.
First and foremost I’d like to thank my family and friends for their
encouragement and support, always. I love you and am lucky to have such a
nurturing community.
Thank you to all of my professors at Emily Carr: Hélène Day Fraser, Laura
Kozak, Craig Badke, Chris Jones, Louise St. Pierre, and Zach Camozzi. My sincere
appreciation for all of your thoughtful advice and kind words. A big shout-out
to Gillian Russell for the editing suggestions and your pragmatic perspective
throughout this program.
Thanks to my cohort; I learned so much with you. Thanks Julie Van Oyen
for all of the reading recommendations that helped inspire this project. A special
thanks to Sierra Megas and Ceilidh Stubbs for listening and sharing so much.
Thank you Craig Barnes for your copy edit!
To my advisor, Keith Doyle, thanks for helping me find my way and
patiently repeating yourself until things sunk in. You helped me see that it is okay
for me to work in my own way at my own pace.
Peter Bussigel, your NMSA course was one of the most inspiring school
experiences I have had. Thanks for working with me on this thesis as my internal
reviewer.
A huge thanks to all of the technicians who graciously shared their
knowledge, especially Logan Mohr, Leon Popik, and Andrew Drakeford.
This project was supported in part by the Ian Gillespie President’s
Discretionary Fund, MDes Ian Gillespie Research Award, The Material Matters
Lab, DESIS, and a MITACS Strategic Business Internship. I am so grateful for this
support.
Finally, I’d like to express my appreciation to Emily Carr University. I came
into school looking for a career, and I came out feeling more connected to the
world around me. I’m not sure where this will take me, but my life will be more
meaningful because of it.
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Project Map

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Land Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge that every step taken to bring this project
to light was on stolen lands: that of the Coast Salish peoples of the TsleilWaututh, Squamish, and Musqueam Nations in the area surrounding Vancouver,
British Columbia, the Semiahmoo Tulalip, Á,LEṈENEȻ ȽTE (W̱SÁNEĆ), and
Stz’uminus peoples where I harvested clay at Lilly Point in Point Roberts, WA,
the territories of Mountain Maidu and the Koyom:k’awi (Konkow) where I took
that clay and placed it in a wildfire outside of Quincy, CA, and the canyons of the
Jicarilla Apache, Pueblos, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute) and Comanche where I grew
up in northern New Mexico.
I was raised by the high mountain snowstorms and desert sun. My
parents landed in New Mexico from the east coast and made a home, setting
roots from which I grew. This place informs who I am in so many ways, but I
never thought too deeply about whom it belongs to.
These lands were acquired through violence and deception—social,
cultural, ecological, and physical displacement and through intentional acts to
erase people and their ways of life. I have spent much of my life blind to the full
depth of these traumas and unaware of the great privilege and benefit I take
for granted everyday living on these lands. Understanding my own position
and responsibility for this history is difficult. What does it mean to belong to a
place? And how do I find my place without being an agent of dispossession?
The following passage in which Rowen White (2019), a seed steward in
Northern California, speaks of belonging has stuck with me throughout this
project. She says:
“I remember driving through those cornfields and thinking, these
seeds are a reflection of the American people. These seeds are a
mix of tattered origins that have been cut and spliced together. In
my mind, I said, these are brokenhearted seeds being planted by
brokenhearted people who have no idea of who they are and where
they come from; so they make seeds that look like themselves.”
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This project is my humble attempt to explore my context as a designer
hoping to steward the places I care about and understand my own belonging
within these colonial histories. I would like to acknowledge how significantly
Indigenous knowledge has shaped this thesis project and me in the process.
In this paper, I use the terms Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous
Epistemologies to speak of these perspectives, but I don’t mean to suggest that
there is a unified or singular Indigenous way of knowing or being.
This land acknowledgment is empty without sincere efforts to change
my actions and work to dismantle the systems of oppression. I would like
to acknowledge the unimaginable resilience Indigenous peoples have shown
resisting centuries of occupation, as well as my gratitude for the continued
generosity and openness I have experienced despite this history. Let this
acknowledgment be an opening for all of us to support Indigenous movements
for sovereignty and self-determination.

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Introduction
This is my story of firing a 3D printed ceramic flask in a wildfire. This
may seem like an unlikely combination of things. Clay is usually fired in kilns,
and wildfires have a reputation for destroying our possessions, not for being a
source of their genesis.
If you know a little bit about me, this story will make more sense. I grew
up running around the foothills in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After college I joined
a community of dusty potters in northern New Mexico and started making
wood-fired ceramics. During the summer months, I worked as a professional
wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, and, in the fall and spring, I
returned to Taos, New Mexico, to make pots. Working with fire both in kilns and
the landscape, the union of the two was an inevitable collision of my creative
process.
When I arrived at Emily Carr University, I started working in the
Material Matters Lab and was introduced to ceramic 3D printing. At first very
skeptical, I experienced the magic of the novel forms this process affords and I
couldn’t ignore it.
These three influences formed the basis for my thesis. My original
research questions for this project were: 1) In what ways can 3D printed clay
broaden our understanding of place, material and digital craft? and 2) How
do the artifacts of industrial design influence our responsibility to place?
Admittedly very broad, my research scope narrowed to focus on using functional
3D printed ceramic objects and wildfires to explore our relationships with these
changing ecologies and complex systems.
The wildfired flask offers a vessel through which to contain this
exploration and share the outcomes. It is the focal point of this thesis, a
visual metaphor that I revolve around as I try to uncover the entanglements of
ceramics, wildfire, and industrial design in an era of deep ecological concern.
The flask holds stories, combines ideas, and maps relationships. It obliges us to
reflect before enjoying our libation.
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In this story, 3D printing emerges as a symbol of technological
innovation, and I question the influence it has on our lived experience and
material culture. My relationship with clay moves beyond just the material, and,
learning from Indigenous Knowledge, I reflect on how it connects me to the land
in a very direct and spiritual way. Fire is discussed as a force of transformation,
life, destruction, and renewal—a force that metamorphoses all of these stories
together into a vessel.
I came to know this area of research slowly over many years of material
practice—foraging, photographing, throwing clay, 3D printing, and fighting
wildfires. Through deep reflection, I attempt to understand how we may live
with wildfires on a human-damaged planet. How can I both make things and
make a difference in such a turbulent, uncertain world? I can start by telling a
story.

A note to the reader:
A relational attitude towards design calls for a personal connection. Fitting with the
ethos of this project, I have chosen to write this thesis in the form of a first person
narrative. You will find the methods, methodologies, design outcomes, and theory
woven in. Like the threads in a wool blanket, we feel/know/experience their warmth
through their interweaving.
Throughout this document I have placed QR codes in the margin that link to videos
and lectures that I reference. Simply scan the code with a QR reader app to watch
them for yourself.

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Part One

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Fig. 1

On Place, Belonging, Relations, Land
Every morning at four, just before the sun begins to climb from behind
the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a wave of cold wind blows across the sage flats.
The dogs bark, a rooster calls, the rough-hewn beams above the kiln creak, and
my shoulders pull tight as I zip my canvas jacket up just a little bit tighter. This
is the place I found community—where I have come to take refuge.
I pull my truck to the side of the road just north of Abiquiú, New Mexico.
The hills here are full of clay—layers of deep purple, red, green, and black earth
that move with the sun, geologic paintings so beautiful that you feel them in
your chest when you walk through the belly of their canyons. They call this
O’Keeffe country because the famous painter Georgia O’Keeffe was fond of
painting this enchanting place. Before that, probably God’s country, Spain’s
claim to the new world and lost cities of gold. Someone always wants to own it,
easily forgetting the Jicarilla Apache, Pueblo, Comanche, and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱
Ute who have dwelled here for thousands of years.

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And now I am here, nauseous from a diesel exhaust leak. My shovel
strikes the black earth of the hillside as I throw the clay into the back of my
truck. The occasional car blows by on the state highway wondering what I’m
doing. I don’t stop until the springs on my old Ford have started to sag. The road
cuts the hillside and exposes earth that was once the bottom of a lake. Dinosaur
critters and probably algae? I don’t know how old this stuff is, but decomposed
plants and time have compressed these creatures into clay that will take on new
life now that my hands have pulled this flesh from the earth and driven it back
to my studio.
Inside the thirty foot long anagama kiln dug into a berm of chocolate dirt
and volcanic boulders, seven hundred pieces of pottery are being transformed
by the fire. As I stoke, ash from the wood falls on to the wares like snow on
a boulder in a scree field. Over the next five days, the heat of the kiln melts
the ash into a glaze. The pots share a distinct organic beauty only achieved
through firing with wood, and the process holds a deep magic. By the end of
the firing, you’ll find me and six artists strewn around the kiln exhausted in the
sand. Tired. Happy. Soon to be drunk. We so value this connection more than
anything. We come here to work with fire.

Fig. 2

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* * * * * *
“These pots have soul!” I tell my classmates during the first weeks of my
Masters in Design studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. I made
sure to bring some with me to show off. They aren’t like those store-bought cups.
I think of the ones I’ve recently seen in Ikea that actually look quite nice but feel
so hollow. “See this part is where the ash collected,” I say as I try to explain why
they are so meaningful. But really it is the place that holds the meanings and
my connection to it. It’s something personal. These pots are meaningful to me
because of all that has gone into making them. By sharing their story, meaning
and connections translate through them. My classmates are starting to feel it
too.
* * * * * *
My new city life in Vancouver, B.C., called for a new way of making
pottery, and I spent the next year and a half learning how to 3D print clay. I
struggled with technological difficulties, yet enjoyed the enchanting new forms
that emerged when I could get the machine and material to collaborate. As a
starting point, I decided to try and translate a clay flask that I typically made
by hand into a digital design. The simple and unique shape of the archetype
really spoke to people, but it was tedious to make. I wondered if I could make
a comparable digital counterpart that would be less time consuming. As I
worked on 3D modeling the flask, I realized that 3D printing clay is much more
involved than the push of a button. It is a craft that requires a relationship with
a machine—an emerging technology I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved with.
I made progress on the flask and came up with some shapes inspired
by stones that offered something different from making by hand. But, as I
developed the skills necessary for 3D printing ceramics, I felt like something
was missing from the process. I was getting to know the modeling programs and
basics of coded clay extrusion, but the connection to something wild and bigger
than myself that I had found while wood-firing kilns in New Mexico was absent.
I was still working with clay, a material that I knew so well, but in an entirely
new and confusing way. Working in this new context with this new technology
made me question how both were influencing my experience making, and how
they affected the artifacts of my design process.
Missing from this new practice was an embodied relationship with the
land. The heart of my making, and the part that I enjoyed so much. Where did
the machine meet the land? And how could I have an embodied relationship with
something bigger than myself through it? This brought up my long standing
concerns that I had about using industrially mined materials in my practice and
their hidden impacts. I continued to make and reflect, unconsciously searching
for a way to tether my making in this new place. I walked the beaches picking
up stones and styrofoam. I floated in the cold ocean, and, as I read relational
design theory, it gave me the tools to map a familiar relationship with the land
in unfamiliar ways.
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* * * * * *
I sat in the sand with my back against a log at Wreck Beach listening to
the waves move the rocks and feeling the sun on my skin. I was reading Priscilla
Stuckey’s Being Known By a Birch Tree: Animist Refigurings of Western Epistemology
(2010) in which she shares her experience of a beloved cut-leaf weeping birch
reaching out to her from across the country while it was dying. Stuckey’s (2010)
recollection of her connection with the birch is used to challenge Western
epistemologies that are based on the “body–spirit, human–nature, and subject–
object dualisms characterizing the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe” ( p. 184). These western
worldviews separate humans from nature and cannot account for the type of
more-than-human relationship that Stuckey has with the birch.
The design implications of the dualisms that Stuckey discusses are
explained well by Louise St. Pierre (2019) in her recent book collaboration
Design and Nature: A Partnership, in which she writes, “the elevation of scientific
and rational thinking combined to diminish society’s ability to see mystery and
enchantment in the natural world. Westerners no longer saw themselves within
an unbounded and uncontrollable cosmos, a world that was larger than humans,
a magical world of intrinsic value” (p. 94). Instead, Westerners held themselves
above nature, elevated by reason, and sought to master natural systems for
their own benefit through mechanistic means and in the name of progress. This
human-centric society replaced “earth-centered values with humanistic ones” (p.
94), instilling values that continue to shape the way we view and interact with
the world today.
Stuckey’s relationship with the birch tree offers an example of a reorientation of a Western way of knowing the world, as she places herself
back in contact with the more-than-human. Drawing on Ojibwa Indigenous
epistemologies, Stuckey suggests that “knowledge in a world made up of
persons, only some of whom are human, means navigating an endlessly shifting
sea of perspectives. If all ‘things’ are potentially persons, then there is no
objective standpoint; there are only multiple perspectives” (Stuckey, 2010,
pp. 194-195). There are only entities creating one another as they interact.
Interconnection with all beings. This perspective necessitates a decentering of
the human in favor of earth-centered values that respect the land and all the
relations that live here.
In that moment, under this new sun, a new side of the world opened up
to me. This deep feeling of interconnectedness re-framed how I thought about
my relationship with clay, fire, and the land in the context of design. It opened
a door towards a way of making that directly engages the mystery of the natural
world that arises when we acknowledge that we aren’t the only meaningful
beings here. I had always felt a connection to clay and fire beyond just a material
to use or force to vitrify, but I didn’t have much of a framework for talking about
them—a way to understand my relationship with these spirits and their agency
within the context of my design process. I dug into this realization that I am
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entangled with the world when I make—with the force of fire, personalities of
clay, community of potters, the trees that are cut to make woodfired pottery, and
with the histories of the landscapes where they grow.
Over the course of this project, I focused on a way of making that
embraces these entanglements and sought to explore them. I began to trace
these relationships and look for ways to share them through design while
challenging the subject/object, human/nature dualisms of modern design in the
process. While I had often thought of my practice as personal, I realized how
dependent it was on the world around me. My practice was in conversation with
this wider world, and there were more than just objects that could be shared.
There were all of the relationships that an object embodies as well.
I was thinking about how I could use the web of an object’s relations,
its interconnections, to make us think about our own position and resultant
practices for how we use them. With those design explorations, maybe we
could collectively come to new understandings that influence us to act more
reciprocally with the natural world we live in. I wasn’t directly aware of it at the
time, but I was figuring out how to make objects that suggest a way of seeing,
objects that mapped my entanglements and shared understandings of how I
relate to this big confusing world of natural forces, robots, fires and spirits. I
was making 3D printed flasks and firing them in an electric kiln, but the whole
process felt too controlled. Where was the wild? Touching clay and stoking the
fire had always brought life to my practice. I realized it was the wild clay and the
wild fire that I wanted to engage with more collaboratively. The objects I wanted
to make would be a conduit to tell their story, vessels for sharing relationships
with wildfire, robots, and the land we inhabit.
* * * * * *
Broadly speaking, this project is about telling stories with and through
objects in order to help us interpret our entanglements—how we are connected
to the things around us and how these relationships influence the world we
live in. We all come from unique backgrounds with unique ways of seeing the
world. For me, design is in the process, in the merging of ideas with objects and
places, and in the sharing of the connections. Design is paying close attention,
in getting to know, and being playful. I am most curious to explore what this
practice reveals to us about our own positionality—how we see the world, and,
resultantly, how we choose to make and use objects as reflections to share these
revelations.
The objects of my design process are thus assemblages that point to their
material and more-than-human relationships. I use clay to experiment, make
connections, and commentary. When designing in this relational way, we are
always met with the questions of origin and care. Where was that clay collected
and how? How was the kiln powered? What is there to know about the place it
was fired, or the computer boards that in part give shape to the form? And how
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do I relate to it all? From this vantage, a ceramic Ikea cup is very different from
the ceramic wood-fired cup. Going a step further, the wildfired flask lives in a
different world altogether, or at least worldview, from a flask you would find
in that shopping maze bathed in fluorescent lights. There is a sea of difference
between objects of mass industrial manufacturing and those made to consider
the impacts of their interconnections.
Tim Ingold’s essay, “Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land”
(2011), offers perspective that will help to unpack these differences and
understand origin. In this essay he lays out genealogical and relational models
of descent in order to explain the differences between colonial and Indigenous
worldviews in regard to ancestry and how this shapes the way we see ourselves
inhabiting this world. According to the genealogical (colonial) model, people
come into the world through the inheritance of genes and cultural traditions,
including language, and inhabit the land that is “a surface to be occupied”
(Ingold, 2011, p. 142). He writes that “by contrast, the relational model situates
the person in the lifeworld from the very start, as a locus of self-organizing
activity: not a generated entity but a site where generation is going on.” (Ingold,
2011, p. 142). Thus, for the relational model, life is about growth, “unfolding
relationships,” and continual development (Ingold, 2011, p. 142).
The importance here is that kinship comes from “common involvement
in spheres of nurture, rather than any principle of shared descent,” which places
value on our relationships (Ingold, 2011, p. 148). If we are to think of this
distinction visually, the genealogical model is represented by a branching tree
with a single trunk that only allows for static, linear points of connection. The
relational model on the other hand would resemble a rhizome, consisting of
“interacting pathways’’ (Ingold, 2011, p. 145). These pathways are what allow
for more-than-human agency and different interpretations of space and time
common to Indigenous ontologies, and thus “the tree is but one part of that
vast rhizome that is the forest as a whole” (Ingold, 2011, p. 145). Everything
is connected, not linearly as in the genealogical model, but relationally with
everything else.
In a generous and moving talk at the Bioneers National Conference in
2002, Indigenous author and educator, Jeanette Armstrong, paints a picture
of what relationality looks like for the Okanagan people that helped me to
understand the distinction Ingold describes. She says, “ In the Okanagan our
understanding of the land is that it’s not just that we are part of the land, it’s
not just that we are part of the vast system that operates on the land, but that
the land is us. In our language the word for our bodies contains the word for
land” (Armstrong, 2014, 04:25). The ability to think, dream, and eat comes from
the land. The body is in the land, and the land gives life. The Okanagan people
have “perfected a way of interacting with the land that is respectful to the land
and respectful to each other” (Armstrong, 2014, 05:15). This reciprocity that
Armstrong describes highlights the responsibility of making with clay, making
with the land, and the relational power of this act.

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So what does all this have to do with making ceramic objects? When
making with an ethic of care in mind, we have to think about an object’s
relations, the objects we put into the world affect the world we live in. My
experiments in making with more-than-human forces, wildfires, are research
through design into ways of making that consider interconnectedness and the
wide-ranging implications this has for design.

A note: There is rich discussion to be had on the topic of more-than-human kinship
with man-made robots and AI. I will be exploring this in future work, invoking Donna
Haraway’s notion of the cyborg which bends our conception of being, but for this
project I have chosen to focus my discussion of kinship on fire and clay.
* * * * * *

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Fig. 3
Two sleepy potters crawl out of their frosted-over cars. An enamel pot
warms coffee over a slash fire I have lit for them. Over the night, while everyone
slept, I moved the fire through the kiln, slowly gaining temperature in cycles,
listening to the crackles in the fire box that punctuated the serenity of the night,
stoking in precise rhythms, choosing my wood very carefully. My friends will pick
up this thread now and fire the kiln till dusk. In a week these potters will leave this
place and tell stories about it. How they danced with fire. How the feeling of the
land came up through their boots.

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Fig. 4

Clay As Connector
I remember watching the snow fall from the window of my mom’s studio
as fog floated through the deep green Ponderosa pines on Atalaya Mountain.
These were my favorite mornings. Snow day, school cancelled. A break from the
endless winter sun in the high desert. The wood stove warmed the adobe walls as
my mom worked on her ceramic jewelry and kept me busy with clay next to her.
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She built this house with her friends and her hands. Nestled in the
mountains, the walls are formed from stacked adobe bricks made of clay, sand, and
straw. Clay holds them together. Like many traditional homes dotting Northern
New Mexico, ours blends into the landscape it is made from. It flows into the land.
When I was ten, my mom knocked a hole in the kitchen wall to put in
a window. I was upset. “I liked that wall,” I told her. When you grow up within
earthen walls your relationship to mud is different. These walls hold you. They
warm you. Their gentle curves sooth you as you grow within them. It is no
surprise then that I have a close relationship with dirt. Clay has always been in my
life—sometimes in my hands, sometimes over my head.
As I began to make functional pottery after college, I was fortunate to
apprentice in a community of potters that forage for clays locally. I got a taste
for how clay can carry a material connection to place through my hands and into
vessels. Willi Singleton is a potter in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania
and perhaps one of the most resolute in using only local materials in order to
foster this connection to place. His approach has influenced my design practice
and inspired me to work with what’s around me.
For Willi, making pottery is about conveying place through the direct,
intimate, experiential connection of working with local materials. He harvests
clays and rocks from creeks below Hawk Mountain, makes ash glazes from rice
and bamboo ash, and fires his kiln with members of his local community. This
locavorism, as he calls it, contributes to the “presence and energy”of the pottery
and the “labor connects [him] to place in ways that cash on the barrelhead at the
ceramic supply store does not.” (Singleton, 2017, p. 33) This practice is not simply
about offsetting his own use of industrially mined materials but working with his
home in an intimate way that can be shared. He believes that everyone, including
the people who buy his pottery, are contributing to the making and understanding
of the work. In this way, Willi’s vessels offer an example of pottery that can
invite us to “think more deeply about place and connectedness in a broad way”
(Singleton, 2017, p. 32), and for me a big takeaway is thinking about how clay and
potter reciprocally shape each other.
One of my favorite things about Willi’s practice is that he uses clay that is
naturally very difficult to work with— “a reluctant accomplice” as he puts it. This
would send most potters to the store to find commercially mined materials to mix
with the clay to make throwing easier. Willi, however, has taken the time to learn
how to work with this clay. He writes,“…the clay dictates how the work is done.
Potters let the clay teach them and lead them forward. Now that I have gotten
accustomed to it, I feel a great satisfaction working with my temperamental clay. I
like feeling that I am meshing with my mountain, as I sink my hands into the clay.”
(Singleton, 2017, p. 34) The clay that Willie works with has shaped his process, his
pottery, the way he works, and the way he lives his life.

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This practice invites us to think about the reciprocity between potter and
place, the pots and the enjoyment of their use, embracing our environment and
being open to the serendipity found while turning mountains into mugs, but,
most importantly, to see clay as a teacher — the land as pedagogy (Simpson,
2014). Clay is truly an amazing material. It is a link that connects all potters.
We fall in love with touching it, seeing the rich textures and colors of clay found
around the world, and the way potters work with them. We listen with lifted ears
to the stories that clay tells, and we work within its bounds as mediators to share
these voices, which we never quite know ourselves until the clay comes out of the
kiln or pit. Clay has a will and a personality. It is always from some place, and the
potter is always in collaboration.
Yet, for the potters and designers whose clay comes in two 25lb blocks,
neatly wrapped in plastic bags and packed in cardboard boxes, I can’t help but
feel like they are missing the best part. It’s like not knowing where one of your
best friends is from. How long have you known each other? I don’t mean this
pejoratively. To the contrary, I just want everyone to experience the joy that can
await you as you lift the clay from a hillside and rub it between your fingers for
the first time, the sun warming your skin and seagulls calling nearby.
This relationship with clay, or lack of a relationship to where clay comes
from, influences the objects we make. When we reduce it to a commodity, the
rectilinear block or industrial bag, we start our practice without the direct
material connections to places that offer natural imperatives for taking care of
the sites we make and take from. Clay becomes just a material that we can load
into 3D printers or slip cast cups from.
The design implications of this un-grounded modern attitude are the
mass produced Ikea cups that do little to energize the encounter with the
consumer before ending up in a landfill. They carry no soul. This is no surprise
since the systems of their manufacturing strip objects of the meaningful
connections from which soul arises and replaces them with externalities—costs
to communities, land, water and people that come in the form of pollution and
exploitation. The good news is that clay has endless potential to help reknit these
connections, to shape the way we view and inhabit the world, to bring soul into
the design process.
* * * * * *
Coming to understand clay as a relation and a teacher has its seeds in the
house I grew up in and my experiences collecting this earth in New Mexico. But
it wasn’t until I read Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s essay, “Land as Pedagogy:
Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation,” that I really began to
think deeply about how making, knowing, and being in the world are connected
and how working with clay can ground a way of coming to know how to be in this
world. Simpson (2014) uses stories of the Nishnaabeg people to “advocate for
a reclamation of land as pedagogy, both as process and context for Nishnaabeg
intelligence, in order to nurture a generation of Indigenous peoples that have
22

the skills, knowledge and values to rebuild our nation according to the word
views and values of Nishnaabeg culture” ( p. 01). She evokes the term Land as
Pedagogy as a means to show how the land is the source of knowledge and the
context of knowing for her people and coming to know is a spiritual, lifelong
practice that “takes place in the context of family, community, and relations”
(Simpson, 2014, p. 7, 22).
She tells the Nishnabeeg story of Kwezens or “little woman” who, while
out in the sugarbush, discovers the sweet syrup of a maple tree after watching
an Ajidamoo, a red squirrel, sucking the sap. She tells her mother who celebrates
this discovery and through this story Simpson says that Kwezens “learned the
sheer joy of discovery. She learned how to interact with the spirit of the maple.
She learned both from the land and with the land. She learned what it felt like
to be recognized, seen and appreciated by her community. She comes to know
maple sugar with the support of her family and Elders” (Simpson, 2014, p. 16).
This way of coming to know is “an intimate process, the unfolding of relationship
with the spiritual world” that “requires complex, committed, consensual
engagement” (Simpson, 2014, p. 15).

Fig. 5
23

I can see myself in Kwezens when I think of playing in the mountains
behind my house as a kid and collecting clay as an adult in Abiquiú, NM. But
my childhood experiences were largely without the support of a community of
individuals who were passing along ways of knowing the land through sharing
stories and embodied learning. I found myself coming to know within a
worldview that couldn’t fully acknowledge the spirit of the clay or how one would
go about forming relationships with it. As someone who is not Indigenous, I find
these stories deeply resonant, though how I relate to them or embody them has
been confusing without a community of my own with which to talk about coming
to know in these ways.
Making wood-fired pottery opened a door to this connection and I have
started to give credence to, and incorporate an openness to animism and learning
from the land into my design process—making room for this spiritual connection
that I have always had but was never especially vocal about as an integral part
of my design practice. I am embracing land as a teacher, a source of knowledge,
and the context for knowing as a foundation for design. In this thesis, clay is
the source of knowledge and the context that connects my project. Clay is the
connector. Clay is the pedagogy. Clay is the teacher. Harvesting clay has been
a way for me to come to know this new area of British Columbia, to think both
about the histories, geologies, material properties, cultures, and the give and
take of how I live in this place. Clay connects the geographically disparate sites
of making that took place during this project and forms a vessel through which
I can discuss emerging technologies as they relate to place. Clay offers a direct
connection to the earth.
* * * * * *
I drive out to Lily Point in Point Roberts, Washington, to escape the city
and partly just to go to the United States. Homesick I guess, and the sun tends to
shine a little more out here. There is something weird and interesting about this
pene-exclave. The mailboxes are painted with American flags, but the gas stations
still sell in liters. I push off trail through some brush until I come to a bluff, a cliff
edge rising above the tidal flats several hundred feet below. I am looking for a
way to the water, but this will do. Beams of sun break through the clouds, and I
soak it up as long as I can, walking back to my truck in the dark.
I had heard rumors of there being clay deposits somewhere at Point
Roberts, and when I return to Lilly Point a few weeks later, I find the trail down
to the water’s edge and walk along the beach for a long ways. A downed log
blocks the beach and, looking up, I notice the hillside is composed of a dark shale
clay. My eyes follow the deposit up the hillside to the top of the bluff where I
realize I had been sitting the last time I came here. The clay was beneath my feet!
I collect a small chunk to test and take it back to school. Andrew Drakeford, a
fellow researcher in the Material Matters Lab at Emily Carr University, teaches
me how to load it into the 3D printers, and together we make a few prints that
work surprisingly well. It is my first 3D clay print. I’m still skeptical, but this 3D
printing thing seems easy. (I can tell you, after hundreds of hours of mess-ups,
that’s not the case, but Andrew graciously got me started.)
24

Fig. 6

25

Before 1892 the reefs of Lilly Point were the shared fishing grounds of
the Semiahmoo, Lummi, Saanich and Malahat peoples, providing substance for
the winter months. Sometime during the 1870s, a settler named John Waller
cut down the Indigenous drying racks and claimed the fishing rights to Lily
Point, known as Cannery Point at that time. (Brown, 1971) The years 18921934 marked a period of commercial fishing by settlers who in that short time
decimated the salmon population of these Salish waters and uprooted the Salish
peoples there. (Brown, 1971) As I walk up to this new clay deposit in a territory
that is not my own, I can’t ignore the colonial history of this place or the question
of, Is it okay for me to collect this clay?
In the Material Matters Lab, we often talk about utilizing 3D clay printers
on a production scale with minimally processed wild clays to make wares that
offer an example of ethical design in line with local values. The idea is that these
emerging technologies make possible a form of distributed manufacturing that
is connected to place. Through the utilization of robotic work and the use of
local materials we could easily produce a large quantity of considered objects—
soulful connected cups to offset the Ikea cup. But, as I grab a handful of clay,
and think of my motivations—to make an object or system of utility to sell—the
inherent capitalist foundations of my way of being gives me pause. Part of me
wants to make 3D printed clay to make a living. How different am I than John
Waller? While I don’t intend to take more clay than I can carry in my backpack,
the point is not lost. Where are the bounds? This is a question of amount, but
more importantly of intention. How many pounds of clay would tip the scale as
too much? What relations with a place keep us beholden to the health of our
providing planet and limit our greed? And what does this look like in a design
practice?
Perhaps making with clay from this Point that is at once within the
United States yet culturally quite Canadian, and inhabiting the unceded
territories of the Coast Salish peoples, is precisely the way to begin to explore
these boundaries—boundaries within ourselves, or societies and how we relate
to earth. How we take earth and how the capitalist machine tears away hillsides
in the silent background. It’s time to put this clay into the machine.

26

Part TWO

27

Fig. 7

Machines And Meaning
It is clear that the ecological benefits and sophistication of
nearly 30,000 years of material advances in clay, combined with
recent developments in additive manufacturing, should not be
seen as opposing ends of a technological spectrum, but rather as
two paradigms that, when coupled together, have the potential
to generate an emergent body of work which will advance the
cultural legacy of clay in an era where the machine and the body
work hand in hand. (Rael, Fratello, 2017, p. 97)
28

I drive up to the architect and researcher Ronald Rael’s place just south
of Antonito, Colorado, as a summer monsoon rain moves across the farmland—
wide open grasslands punctuated by center pivot sprinklers and towering
Cottonwoods. This place is surprisingly lush. Beautiful. Open space to think.
I imagine the Serengeti may feel like this. To the east the Rio Grande river
meanders through this gentle landscape which comes as a surprise to me as I
arrive from Taos, New Mexico, just south of here where the same river carves its
way through a rugged basalt box canyon 240 meters deep.
I’d pestered Ronald Rael for a few weeks before he agreed to allow this
stranger to come see his 3D printed adobe buildings during a pandemic. Rael’s
family has been here for eleven generations and you can tell he takes pride in
this place. Even though he is a professor in Berkley, CA, this is his home and the
pandemic has afforded him more time here. The 3D buildings are recognizable
immediately as I drive up. Rising like silos, they make me chuckle when I first
see them. I’m not sure why exactly, but I think it has something to do with how
normal they feel here. In a way, Rael’s Instagram feed and all the attention these
structures have received makes them feel larger than life, revolutionary, but here
they just feel like part of the landscape. Still just mud. Highly organized but not
overly refined, they are experiments.
The printer is nearly silent and we take time to chat. Rael’s past projects
BAD OMBRÉS (2017) and Emerging Objects (2016) call attention to the rich
historical legacies of clay and create potentialities through which we can see clay
as the sustainable material of the future. The flowing surfaces of these vessels
reference traditional basket weaving and are outwardly political. BAD OMBRÉS
is a series of 3D printed ceramic vessels that combine light and dark shades
of clay to comment on Donald Trump’s racist use of the term Bad Hombres in
reference to U.S./Mexico border security. Rael writes, “An ombré, in this case,
would be a geopolitical or cultural ombré that crosses political boundaries fluidly
and allows for continuous cultural connections to be made” (Rael, Fratello, 2017,
p. 96). Inspired by this metaphor, and the use of 3D printing clay as critique,
I’m curious where this current work stands, and I ask him, “Do you see these
as a means to house the world or a commentary about place?” To which Rael
responds something like, “Well, yes, but I also see them as a business model.”
His response both surprises me and reminds me of my idealized way of
thinking. He brings up his business Potterware, a system for visually designing
3D printed ceramics that makes the technology more accessible, and he
mentions how the potter’s adoption of the 3D printer will be akin to the wheel.
This makes me somewhat uncomfortable as a potter who has always felt that
there is something lacking in the 3D printer—something alien, disembodied,
and disconnecting. But, as I look off into the field that Rael’s great great great
grandfather cultivated and tended, and see the earth from this place take shape
in the rich brown 3D printed adobe spirals, a connection to place enabled by
technology has never felt stronger. Yet, as I think about my last month trying to
build a 3D printer of my own, wrestling with a CERAMBOT 3D printer kit, my
weariness of this technology resurges.
29

Fig. 8

30

Fig. 9

* * * * * *
There’s a crumpled box leaning against the door of my Taos studio
that looks like it just tumbled out of a van passing by on the highway. The
CERAMBOT 3D printer that I’ve been waiting for has finally arrived! Opening
it up, a pile of unmarked parts, screws, belts, and electronics spill out onto the
cement floor of my studio. I scratch my head then spend the next several weeks
trying to piece this frustrating mess together. Tolerances are off, plastic parts
that should be hollow to accept a tube are solid, and the motor isn’t strong
enough to push clay. The list of grievances goes on, and the online and social
media forums supporting the printer mirror my sentiment. Hundreds of people
expecting to be happily 3D printing clay have found themselves knee-deep in a
DIY nightmare.
After 70 hours or more of troubleshooting this machine, I start to
question the point of the endeavor. What is the importance of making objects
this way? Here I am running between my computer and the printer wanting
to pull my hair out, typing in codes G28, M420 S1, M164. Why won’t it work?
Where is the flow, the creative intuition, the soul? The getting lost in the tactile
feeling of turning out pottery like the machinist does a screw? I feel like I am at
the machine’s mercy.
I imagine Willi throwing in his studio with the clay he’s spent a
decade getting to know. Maybe I just need to get to know the machine a little
better, create a digital connection. Willi would roll his eyes. I’m not convinced
myself. Most potters who know me wonder why I would even be interested
in 3D printing to begin with. It seems so antithetical to my personal practice.
Computer chips feel alien, extractive, cold. Clay feels warm, earthy, alive. It
offers a direct, tactile, simple connection. Why would I want to use a machine to
do the very thing I love to do so much with my hands?
At face value, the handmade object and the robot-arm-made pot are
incomparable, especially to the skilled craftsman. The potter’s sentiment towards
this intrusion of technology into the human act of making pots with our hands
drifts towards disdain. Thinking back to my conversation with Rael though,
technological advances have always influenced hand-made crafts and often to our
benefit. The electric-powered pottery wheel reinvented the human-powered kick
wheel, which arguably made it easier for potters to make a living by increasing
the speed at which they could make sell-able wares.
The analogy isn’t perfect since the electric wheel didn’t displace the
potter’s hands and the specific knowing through their use. The 3D Ceramic
Printer may increase the speed at which potters can produce work, and in this
way perhaps it offers this same technological reinvention for ceramics that Rael
mentions—one that is needed to keep pace with the culture of automation that
the world is adopting.
If we are to think of this as simply an issue of economics or efficiency,
the automation of clay production makes sense, but the question is not simply
31

about economics. It has to do with how we value objects more broadly. What they
mean to us, how they make us feel, how we enjoy making them, the stories they
tell and connections they make. Making pottery by hand is tactile and sensorial
in a way that 3D printing is not. There is a level of abstraction when making 3D
printed pots. The machine has taken the place of your hands, and it is important
to think about how both the machine and the objects they produce mediate our
experience with making, place, and material.
In the book, Innovation and its Enemies, Calestous Juma explains social
and cultural resistance to new technologies while offering a pro-technological
argument for innovation. With the advent of music recording at the start of
the twentieth century, the life of the performing musician changed drastically.
Juma (2016) notes that this new technology “democratized music and made
listening more convenient. But it threatened the employment of live musicians
in America”(p. 207). The jukebox and radio put musicians out of work which
prompted unions to enact a 1942 ban on recordings. Critics of the new
technology argued that this new mass produced music “reduced the human
interaction afforded by live music” and that “jazz recordings removed music from
its source, and as a result it lost its authenticity and meaning” (Juma, 2016, p.
210). The parallels to 3D printing clay are clear through the fears associated with
a change in the degree of human connection, interaction, and also the economic
repercussions of the emerging technology.
Many potters are fearful of the 3D printed robotic pot replacing them
or at least making it harder for them to make a living. If we look to the history
of musical recording, their fears are well founded. Broadcasting industries were
focused on making a profit and did little to benefit the musicians who were
struggling to make a living (Juma, 2016, p. 217). Juma (2016) acknowledges
that these economic fears, which he terms “technological unemployment” are
real, but argues that the broad benefits and economic opportunities created by
new technologies are often ignored (p. 220). One such benefit is the accessibility
of music which we are all probably grateful for, or at the least influenced by. The
development of electronic music is another. Both are positive outcomes to a
highly resisted technology.
A key difference of course is that potters can choose to integrate this
technology into their practices without fear that the “industry” as a whole
will make them obsolete. There will always be a place for the handmade pots
just as there are still performing musicians, and Juma argues that demonizing
technologies based on the “uncertain nature of the risks associated with new
technologies and the logical impossibility of proving the negative” are often
unfounded (Juma, 2016, p. 66). We just don’t know what these technologies will
bring about. There may be some uncomfortable changes, but there will also be
great societal advantages, and Juma suggests that demonizing new technology is
futile.
This same argument—that we don’t know what these technologies will
afford, or how they will affect us—is equally as important when questioning
unbridled technocratic solutions. This is especially salient in a world where
32

the globalized production of new technologies has a history of causing social
and ecological harms. With this in mind, I can’t shake the discomfort I have
incorporating 3D printers so directly into my design practice which aims to do
exactly the opposite. To make in a way that is more connected and less extractive.
So does this distrust of these emerging technologies mean I’m just the musician
that fears the record? The potter that hates the computerized pot?
Perhaps this technology, though dependent on harmful industries and
practices for its production, can provide benefits that far outweigh these harms.
Maybe smaller scale distributive 3D clay manufacturing has the power to create
objects that re-knit our connection to place, or perhaps a flask fired in a wildfire
can help us to build a more reciprocal relationship with, and phenomenological
understanding of, this natural force. From this vantage point, we need to think
more deeply about how technologies and subsequent technological artifacts affect
us both as makers and users and how they mediate our relationship to the world we
live in.
In the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency,
and Design, Peter-Paul Verbeek offers an accounting of how technological artifacts
mediate humans’ relationship with their world. He analyzes what technologies
and technological artifacts actually do with people and argues that they play a
mediating role in the “ways the world can be present for people and the ways
people can be present in their world” (Verbeek, 2010, p. 08). By this he suggests
that technologies “co-shape” our relationship with our world in profound ways
(Verbeek, 2010, p. 08).

Fig. 10
33

Verbeek offers a departure from classical approaches to philosophy
of technology and provides a framework through which we can evaluate the
implications of the Wildfired Flask as an object that conscientiously mediates
our relationship to our world. Citing the philosophy of Jaspers, Heidegger,
and Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, Verbeek (2005) argues that these classical or “transcendental”
works in philosophy of technology paint a picture of technology that “alienates”
people from the world, reducing them to a cog in the machine with no meaning
(p. 99). Grappling with the ramifications of this new era of industrialization,
these early twentieth century perspectives make sense given their context, and
Verbeek (2005) writes that “the repetitive, monotonous character of assemblyline work appeared to herald a new kind of mass society and homogenized
existence; cold, anonymous industrial complexes seemed to indicate the onset
of a reduced relation to the world” (p. 99). Prescient insofar as the 3D printed
pot is concerned, the same fear rings true—one that these hi-tech pots somehow
reduce our relation to the world.
What are the consequences of this 3D printed mechanical reproduction?
They are often criticized as cold and impersonal, especially by potters that have
never handled one. It feels natural to challenge the authenticity of an easily
replicable, 3D printed ceramic object. Certainly this mass-printed computergenerated object reduces our human connection to the world. It can’t be as
meaningful as something handmade. But Verbeek argues that these classic
arguments are based on the object’s “conditions of possibility” looking backward to
how it originated and not “forward to what it actually does” (Verbeek, 2005, p.
29). Our relationship with technologies is more complex than can be understood
simply by focusing on an object’s origins, and Verbeek (2005) argues “an artifact
can play more roles in human life than functional ones” (p. 30). In order to
understand these roles, we need to take a phenomenological approach to the
philosophy of technology.
Verbeek’s phenomenological account of technology bears interesting
parallels to the relational ways of knowing discussed at the opening of this thesis
on Indigenous epistemologies. He states, “what people are and what their world
is, is co-determined by the relations and interactions they have with each other”
(Verbeek, 2010, p. 03), which is to say we are our relations. For Verbeek (2010)
the world is the only place we can “realize our existence” and “the world can only
be what it is when humans deal with it and interpret it” (p. 03). This perspective
builds on Heidegger’s existential philosophy of being in the world and
acknowledges that we are interrelated with our world and the interconnections
produce our experience—insights which have, not surprisingly, been endemic to
Indigenous epistemologies for thousands of years. Only in contemporary times
have Western philosophers begun to migrate towards them. (Verbeek, 2010, p.
78)
The logical necessitation of this argument is that technologies orient how
we are in the world. They mediate how we deal with it and interpret it. Verbeek
(2010) suggests that “artifacts are not neutral intermediaries, but actively co34

shape people’s being in the world: their perceptions and actions, experience and
existence” (p. 04). Examples of this can be seen through scientific instruments
like the microscope that reveal “aspects of reality” that we must interpret
(Verbeek, 2005, p. 144), Bruno Latour’s example of a speed bump that mediates
our intention of driving quickly to driving slowly so as not to damage our car
(Verbeek, 2010, pp. 04-06), and using a wood-fired stove instead of forced air.
The wood stove structures your day as you chop kindling, brings your attention
to the fuel you are using, and connects you to the source of the heat.
Like Juma, Verbeek believes that we should focus on the ways in which
technology can mediate our relationship with our world positively. In response,
I immediately think of the embodied comforts of ways of old. I’m someone who
prefers to heat my house with wood because of the way it connects me to the
mountains where I harvest Piñon pine and the feeling on my skin as I crouch
next to the stove. Admittedly, I appreciate the convenience of not having to
wake up in the cold and start a fire. I like to make pottery with my hands because
of the way it connects me to the clay and the feeling of flow I experience while
making. But, admittedly, I am entranced watching my 3D clay printer put down
layers, especially while listening to house music. An immediate acceptance of
emerging technologies has not come naturally to me. I am inherently skeptical,
but my inquiry is precisely about engaging the ways in which we see the positive
potentialities of 3D printing clay.
The tenet that artifacts of technology mediate our actions carries with
it several imperatives and Verbeek highlights the important role designers
play in determining these mediations that affect all of us. It is through both
affordances and material that objects mediate our relationship with our
world and our sensorial involvement with them. (Verbeek, 2010, p. 07). We
handle pottery, we touch and feel it, eat and drink with it, and these sensorial
connections are meaningful to how we live. Verbeek (2010) suggests that ”the
aesthetics of mass products should not only concern beauty or meanings, but
the sensorial relationships between humans and their world as well,” and he calls
for a new aesthetics that anticipates “the mediating role of products’’ (p. 07).
This aesthetic is not simply visual, it carries with it an ethic since objects “shape
the way in which people experience their world… and organize their existence,”
(Verbeek, 2005, pp. 216-217), an ethic of designing permanence and making
objects that we form attachments to. With the recognition that objects affect
people’s existence, it is designers’ responsibility to be mindful of how we mediate
these relationships.
When viewed through this framework, the making of 3D printed ceramic
objects carries both meaning and responsibility. This is especially so when we
think of 3D printing clay as an alternative to mass-manufacturing in the form of
a localized, distributive practice that puts objects in the hands of many. But also
in ways it affects the personal practice of artists and designers that engage this
emerging technology. I am exploring this meaning. How can these 3D printed
objects and the practice of making them shape our experience and even organize
our existence?
35

The 3D printed wildfired flasks are my attempt to show a mindful way
of making a vessel, designing permanence, and experimenting in how we may
design when we truly make an attempt to be mindful of the mediating role
objects play. Can we design collaboratively with natural forces? Can we craft with
wildfire? Can we expand our understanding of kinship and use this inclusivity
to re-tool our design practices in order to reconsider who, how, and what we
are designing for? The hope is that these vessels carry new ways of seeing and
an imperative for new ways of acting for those who engage with them. They
metamorphose the seemingly cold, calculated, industrial technology of 3D
printing with the wild, forceful energy of a wildfire that elicits both fear, awe, and
rejuvenation. In so doing they offer a medium through which we can think about
how designed objects are entangled with our natural world. We are confronted
with a functional object that challenges us to think more deeply about the origins
and relations of the things we use every day.
I have reservations accepting Verbeek and Juma’s technocratic position
in the age of the Anthtropocene in which technological innovation is arguably
a factor contributing to our changing climate. But leading examples of utilizing
emergent technologies that begin to reknit these connections to earth are helpful
models to evaluate how we may innovate.
As I leave Ronald Rael’s place, I pass by 100 year old adobe houses that
are crumbling into the ground, returning to the same earth that Rael is himself
printing. They are ruins from a different time, but they are the same mud now
used in this new era “where the machine and the body work hand in hand” (Rael,
Fratello, 2017, p. 97).

Fig. 11
36

Fig. 12

Fig. 13
37

Part Three

38

With Fire
There is no better feeling than coming off of a burning mountain into a
town of residents cheering for the firefighters as they return from the field. You
have saved their homes. You have supported their communities by keeping the
fire at bay. You and your crew have protected the forest and have worked hard
to do it. You are a hero, and fire is the enemy. While the firefighter’s efforts
are praiseworthy, this narrative is as problematic as it is easily understandable.
A force with the power to level towns and turn the landscapes we love into
blackened moonscapes is, without a doubt, scary and disruptive. We want to
push it away or control it and have the fire live by our terms. But the truth is,
humans have co-evolved with fire and the regenerative role it plays in ecosystems.
The environments where we now reside are livable because Indigenous peoples
utilized fire to shape these landscapes over thousands of years. We can thank
our earliest ancestors for blazing this symbiotic relationship with fire— and
we can thank our recent history for the disunion visible in the hero stories so
symbolic of our modern time.

39

Since the turn of the 20th century, foresters in the United States have
pushed for fire prevention practices to limit the spread of fire on public lands,

Fig. 14

citing economic impacts, forest health, and conservation. In the 1920 publication,
“Piute Forestry” Or The Fallacy of Light Burning, William B. Greeley, Assistant
Forester of the United States, argued that we should “make the woods as fireproof
as practicable” and “ put fires out by the systematic organization of all the forces
available in an emergency” (Greeley, 1920, p. 33). His argument came in response
to a growing call from the Southern Pacific Railroad and large timber-owning
corporations for Light Burning or “Piute Forestry.” Light Burning is an Indigenous
method of forest management in which fires are deliberately set during the
shoulder seasons of spring and fall when higher moisture levels allow for lowintensity ground fires. The result is a regular occurrence of low severity fires that
clean up the ground fuels and prevent larger catastrophic fires. Greeley (1920)
argued that this “propaganda” about light burning would lead to “total destruction
of young growth” (pp. 34-36) and fires thus had to be prevented at all costs in the
name of conserving our forests.
An era of industrialized wildland firefighting ensued, modeled on the
military apparatus, and supported by the abundance of machinery left over from
World War Two. Flash forward to 2021, and over a hundred years of wildfire
prevention coupled with a changing climate has led to overgrown, unbalanced
forest ecosystems that burn with catastrophic intensity. As they burn, we are all
reminded and many are becoming aware for the first time that forest ecosystems
are fire dependent, and yet the survival of our communities seems, paradoxically,
dependent on fire prevention which is becoming increasingly more difficult.

40

Fig. 15

It is not enough to simply re-introduce fire into landscapes. We must
also consider the historic ways people have lived with fire. In Fire A Brief History,
Stephenn Pyne maps the history of humans and fire and suggests that “what
is needed is the return of the aboriginal fire regime, a particular pattern of fire
foraging, hunting, cleansing, and littering” (Pyne, 2001, p. 64). We must consider
the historic Indigenous use of fire that has shaped these ecosystems which
includes the relational practices of living with and using fire. Moving forward
with prescribed fire without the change in mindset for how we relate to our
forests would be tantamount to not even starting because modernist attitudes
are incompatible with rebalancing our fire-adapted ecosystems. What is needed
is a new story for how we may relate to wildfires. These flasks that I have placed
in wildfires are vessels with which to carry that message: to begin to work in a
relational way with fire and to carry stories that can help shift attitudes.
Before wildland firefighters walk out of those mountains, floating in
the smell of sawdust, gasoline, sweat, and diesel, they have been working with
fire. Either deliberately setting backfires to burn out fuel ahead of the main fire,
chasing the cold edge, or mopping up the hot spots left behind. This work takes
know-how and a rich relationship with fire. In the world of wildland firefighting,
there is talk of being students of fire. You are always learning from fire—both
about the fire and all the while about yourself. You learn its patterns and
behaviors. You watch as it crawls like a maze through pine litter on a meditative
afternoon or stand aside as full swaths of forest are swallowed in the roars of a
running crown fire.

Fig.
4116

Sleep deprived, its warmth may lull you into a nap as you rest your face
on pine needles nearing the end of your night shift. Or your heart will beat
hard in its presence as you learn how to manage your fear, pushing the physical
limits of your body. Which way is out? A good student remembers that fire
can always defy your expectations and is constantly humbled. You have spent
so many hours walking in the woods with fire that you learn the intricacies of
how it moves within a myriad of ecosystems—the many moods, modes and
manifestations of wildfires. You may feel the heat of the rising sun on your neck
and notice that the morning dew has dried from the California eucalyptus and
know the fire will soon wake. Or you lift your eyes from your work as you hear
the afternoon winds picking up and moving through the canopies on an adjacent
ridgeline, and you expect to see smoke starting to rise.
For something you grow so close to, enemy is not a fitting name, nor is
fire something you fight. It may chase you through the woods and move through
your dreams, but it also gives you something deep that you come back for every
summer. This force captivates you; it makes you feel strong and connected.
Without it you feel something is missing. You may take a summer away,
but you’ll come right back the next, motivated to return not so much by the
paycheck, or even the desire to put the fire out, as you are by your enjoyment of
being around fire. You have grown dependent on fire, an anomaly in the modern
day, though perhaps not so crazy when we acknowledge the historic relationship
between humans and fire. It is a co-evolving one that allowed humans to
colonize the earth, as Pyne (2001) points out in saying, “unburnable landscapes
were generally unlivable ones,” ( p. 46) a statement that on its own should make
us rethink the hero story of firefighting.

42

Fig. 17

* * * * * *
Potters in Taos build a connection with fire as they stoke their kilns, like
the wildland firefighters that harnesses flame to limit the growth of a wildfire.
Both are forms of containing fire and using it in a controlled manner for a desired
outcome. From the burning of fields to the combustion engine, humans have
used the power of fire to provide comfort and refuge, making unlivable climates
livable, inedible food edible, and allowing our footprints to crisscross the globe.
(Pyne, 2001, p. 182). The technologies we have built from this elemental reaction
and our relationship with it make us uniquely human, affording us evolutionary
advantages that we have used to shape the very climate we inhabit. But as
influential as we may have become, our lives are quite simply dependent on fire.
This dependency on fire is as profound as we want to make it. Just think
of the sun, a ball of fire fueling the photosynthesis that supports all life. But, in
the western context, it can also seem as trivial as the flame hidden away in the
machine in the basement that warms our house. Design has had the tendency
of hiding the inner workings of the objects we use. The Blaauw kilns at Emily
Carr University of Art and Design hide the flame within a sleek, sexy computerprogrammed white box. They are efficient and easy to use, but you could graduate
without ever seeing fire on your wares. This disconnected design process makes
for disconnected wares. It’s time to let the fire out of the kiln.
					
* * * * * *
The North Complex Fire near Quincy, CA (2020) made a historic run that
leveled over 180,000 acres and several towns in sixteen hours, killing 16 people.
It was unprecedented; it was a “career fire”. Fire managers frequently told me
something like, “In all my years doing this, I’ve never seen a fire behave like that.”
I was there documenting for the U.S. government, filming the fire move across
the landscape, the firehose being laid down in threatened communities, and
interviewing firefighters.
Inside my pocket next to my lighter, my Incident Action Plan, and my
lens cap—were two 3D printed Point Roberts clay flasks. The idea of wildfired
ceramics came to me one morning in western New Mexico when I was putting
in line on a fire crew. Our Pulaskis (the original firefighting tool, a hybrid axe
and hoe) pulled up chunks of rich red clay, and I joked with another potter on
the crew that we should make some pots out here. We didn’t, but the idea stuck.
After working so closely with fire in both kilns and in the landscape, the collision
of the two was inevitable.
The first flask I placed in the California grass immediately disappeared
into the green foliage on a steep hillside. The 3D printed clay lines camouflaged
like the tan hide of a white-tailed deer, and it took searching around on my hands
and knees to find it again. I laughed to myself as I padded the flask with dried
pine needles, branches, and a layer of rock to protect it from getting crushed. I
was preparing a pit firing of sorts as the fire was putting up a huge plume in the
adjacent canyon, and I could feel its presence. I marked the GPS point and then
43

headed down the road. The flask is presumably still there, since I didn’t make it
back into the area after the “firing.”
A few days later another opportunity arose to fire a flask as firefighters
were burning off a road, setting fire ahead of the main fire to consume the fuel
before it got there. I ran into the Manzanita brush with my camera and the flask,
and dropped the flask hurriedly. I marked its location and left, driving down
the road to the town of Berry Creek where a ruin awaited me. I came back to the
firing spot under moonlight that night and stumbled around for a while until
I found the flask. “Fuck!” I blurted out when I found it. “It just barely kissed
it.” The fire had backed into the area and crawled through the grass with low
intensity. The hot, blackening, rock-forming firing I was expecting had been
supplanted with a smoky whispering. Picking up the flask left a green relief in
the burnt grass. Replaying the video later, I was surprised by my reaction which
showed my expectation for the fire to behave in the way I desired. Was I really
making with fire?

44

Fig. 18

The piece is subtle and expressive, blackened with wisps of fire that you
can feel. An x crosses over the spout, a relief mark created by the grass it was
fired in. Transposing a narrative and seeking to build a relation; What does
this flask hold? Is it whiskey or water? Is it 100 years old or an object from the
future? A stone or an ancient sacramental vessel? Here is a collision of the
hi-tech and the wild. A layering of meaning. When 3D printing clay, we take
mud and push it through a machine, the sum of our tool making knowledge
and refined commodities-- knitting together the ancient with the future, the
wild with the synthetic. When wildfiring we take all of this and metamorphose
it into one, solidifying the layers of meaning embedded in the clay and fire and
prompting us to think about how we relate to all these things. The resultant
vessels give visible form to the often invisible systems that underpin our
experience and behavior in the world we design. They are vessels for which we are
meant to hold new stories and visualize these relationships.
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin, challenges the hero’s
story and offers a more nurturing view for how we engage the world and write
history. Julie Van Oyen, a masters student in my cohort, summarizes this nicely
in our recent publication Micro Care, writing, “Le Guin’s (1988) The Carrier Bag
Theory of Fiction offers an alternative way of being human to the usual story of
prehistoric hunters and weapon-wielders. This one theorizes that before “the
luxury” of sharp tools and weapons, humans quite possibly had already been
using containers for storing food, valuables, children and even themselves (via
houses) for a very long time. This is important to allow space for humans to be
collectors and sharers as well as (and perhaps before) killers and consumers, a
space we need now possibly more than ever.” (Van Oyen et al., 2020, p. 12). Le
Guin (1988) offers the hero as a bottle, a thing with which to carry “in its older
sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else” ( p. 150). As
Julie points out, the carrying, the collecting, the sharing is a space from which
we must come together to face the biggest challenges of our day. As we pass the
proverbial flask around, we are all invited to take a sip of what is held within.
Not a hero’s story, but a vessel through which to carry a more nuanced story. The
flasks are containers offering a new way to carry fire.

45

Fig. 19
46

EMERGING FROM RUINS
Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough
curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible
and terrifying. Natural history and ethnographic attentivenessthemselves products of modern projects-offer starting points for
such curiosity, along with vernacular and Indigenous knowledge
practices. Such curiosity also means working against singular
notions of modernity. How can we repurpose the tools of
modernity against the terrors of Progress to make visible the
other worlds it has ignored and damaged? Living in a time of
planetary catastrophe thus begins with a practice at once humble
and difficult: noticing the worlds around us. (Tsing et al., 2017, p.
M7)
I can tell that I should be wearing a mask immediately after stepping out
of my truck in Berry Creek, California. There is something acrid hanging in the
air—a community of homes, play structures, gearhead’s car collections, not to
mention an entire forest and the reality that our material culture is hazardous
to our health. I’ve never seen something like it. I drove through twenty miles of
leveled forest to get here. Nuked. Moonscaped. The entire forest was turned into
blackened sticks. Every tree, as far as I could see, was killed.
The stories from the day Berry Creek burned are harrowing. Firefighters
broke into buildings, sheltering behind cement walls that turned into saunas as
they breathed through their supplied air respirators. When the firestorm had
passed, they emerged into a blackened wasteland. The houses had disappeared
leaving only brick chimneys, and melted cars left pools of aluminum running
down their driveways. The small mountain community nestled in a dense green
forest was gone. In its place stood an apocalyptic scene once reserved for movies,
now a recurring reality.
The sound of my boots on the blacktop punctuates the silence as I walk
through this ruin several days later. I am alone here. Drifts of ash collect on the
fallen mailboxes, and I leave a trail of footsteps as I work to document what has
become of this place. My tracks are the first disturbances in a site where nothing
has been touched, and yet everything has been disturbed. As I focus my camera,
I forage for meaning in this ruin. Scanning for something to bring back from this
place. Taking notes, images that I will spend the next several months tangling
and untangling in my head while trying to make sense of it all.
Insight comes by way of Anna Tsing (2017), The Mushroom at the End of
the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, in which she explores the
entanglements of capitalism, the planet, and those who inhabit it. She follows
the path of the matsutake mushroom from the hillsides of the Pacific Northwest,
where refugees from Laos and Cambodia forage them, through the brightly-lit
warehouses of brokers where they are sorted, and into the Japanese economy
47

where they are a gifted delicacy. The story highlights the impacts that systems
of capitalism have on people, the mushrooms, and the planet. It is a story of
exploitation, but also of creativity, diversity, and resilience as the foragers and
mushrooms “manage to survive within human destructiveness” (Tsing, 2013,
08:54).
Matsutake emerge from disturbed soil, and Tsing uses them as a
metaphor for the “precarious life without the privilege of stability” (Tsing, 2013,
10:03) emblematic of both the pickers whose livelihoods are dependent on them
and the environments where the mushrooms thrive. The foragers’ precarity
stems from their disadvantaged position within capitalist systems. Living on
the fringes, they turn to the damaged land left in industries’ wake where they
“search for assets” and learn to “live in capitalist ruins” (Latour et al., 2018, p.
590). Tsing’s message is stark, but so is the aftermath of the North Complex Fire
in Berry Creek, CA. This site forces us to reflect on our precarious position living
on a human-damaged planet, to take a step into a capitalist ruin.
While the social and environmental impacts of capitalist systems can be
seen directly through exploitative labor practices and oil spills, the causal link
between human actions and communities leveled by wildfires is more opaque.
Berry Creek is a capitalist ruin in the sense that byproducts of capitalist practices
like emissions are affecting the climate and making places like it unlivable, but,
more importantly, it is symptomatic of a way of inhabiting a place that is out of
balance with the natural world. In a conversation between Bruno Latour, Anna
Tsing, and Isabelle Stengers, Stengers comments that Tsing’s Matsutake is “a
story of expropriations,” of alienation in terms of exploitation of humans, but
also alienation as “a being separated from what makes you alive, a condition
in which you stop thinking, imagining, and noticing particular beings and
reactions” (Latour et al., 2018, p. 590). Ruins like those found in Berry Creek
highlight our strained relationship with the systems that sustain life. They
are wake-up calls that our attitudes toward inhabiting place (e.g. through
petrochemical dwellings built in fire-starved ecosystems) ignore the other beings,
reactions, and systems that we are entangled with. These modernist attitudes
have made us blind to the intricacies of our reciprocal relationship with fire and
place.
Latour (2018) comments that the funny thing about the modernists is
that they have “invented a way of not being of the Earth” (p. 592). In the pursuit
of progress, we have grown estranged from our natural world, creating a utopia
that is a “place of nowhere” (Latour et al., 2018, p. 592). Less connected to our
context and relations, we are a culture that has lost touch with the depth of our
reciprocal relationship with the earth. In his book Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures
on the New Climactic Regime, Latour explains the imperative of “redefining
modernity’s relation to its own earthly grounding” (Latour et al., 2018, p.
588). This re-grounding comes through discussion on Gaia, the theory of a
self-regulating system that maintains homeostasis on earth and the critical zone
which is the thin covering of the planet where all life exists. It is a hypothesis
that entangles us directly within these systems.
48

It is hard to sit with a community that has been transformed into
toxic black ash like Berry Creek, but paying attention to these sites of jarring
transformation and thinking deeply about what is happening within them is a
way to start re-shaping these ruins. As the story of the Matsutake mushroom
rising out of the disturbed soil shows, there are “opportunities in these ruins”
(Latour et al., 2018, p. 594). There is opportunity to begin noticing and
engaging, paying close attention to what is happening within these sites and
engaging by means of research through design. By spending time in these areas,
cultivating a material practice within them, and then deeply reflecting on the
relationships that I am observing, I hope to better understand what problems we
need to address and how we can address them. Creating objects in and with these
places—objects that mediate our experience with our world as Verbeek suggests,
may help us to understand the complex systems and relationships at play so we
can learn to navigate them more harmoniously.
* * * * * *
The wind picks up little swirls of ash as it moves through the blackened
trees, and I kneel down to scoop some into a zip lock bag. It is calm here. The
storm has passed. There is a microwave smoldering in the distance. Burnt beer
cans are littered about. I’m kneeling in what was a good old forest trash heap. I
think of the pottery sherds that I have found while out walking in the deserts
of the Southwest U.S. and their beautiful designs patinated by time but still
visible. Archaeologists have told me the sherds are from trash heaps. I think back
to Berry Creek down the road and the heaps of houses. Is this what our distant
relatives will find of us? What stories will our remains tell? And what stories can
our objects tell us now to persuade us from leaving toxic ruins in our wake?
I make my way to the GPS point where I have placed the flask in the fire.
After a while, with the help of my headlamp I find it. The flask emerges from the
ash like a matsuke, full of hope and possibility. It is holding the story that I can
now share. A story of imperfect reciprocity, making sense of place, emerging
technologies, and how I relate to them. I drive down the road and pull over on a
desolate stretch. A burning tree sends up fireflies into the night sky. I have seen
a lot today, but sitting here, with the crackling fire, I feel a comforting stillness. I
take a shower when I make it back to my hotel, and my body leaves a hydrophobic
film of grey residue that sticks to the tub. The air in Berry Creek has coated my
body in a way that a forest never has. When I make it back to my studio, I make
a glaze out of the ash I collected that day and use it to make a series of flasks—
flasks that not only rise from the ash like a matsutake, but use it to transform
them into something beautiful, something to carry stories of fire that can’t be
put out.

49

Fig. 20

50

51

Works Cited
Brown, J. (1971). The Blaine–Point Roberts salmon fisheries. Surrey History. https://
www.surreyhistory.ca/fisheries.html
Chisholm, J., Farber, A., Kozak, L., Van Oyen, J., Carr, M. S., Olowo-Ake, O., Shaw,
J., & Sung, J. (2020). Micro-Care: Small Acts of Resilience for Living within the
Earth’s Carrying Capacity. Canadian Association of Graduate Studies. https://
libby.ecuad.ca/publishingthepresent/catalog/micro-care-small-acts-ofresilience-for-living-within-the-earths-carrying-capacity/
Critical Thinkers - Anna Tsing - Part 1. (2013, February 1). [Video]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5CBpVsycOo&t=538s
Fletcher, K., Pierre, S. L., & Tham, M. (2019). Design and Nature: A History. In
Design and Nature: A Partnership (1st ed., pp. 92–108). Routledge.
Greeley, W. B. (1920). “Piute Forestry” or the fallacy of light burning. The
Timberman, 21(5), 38–39. https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/
uploads/2016/12/PiuteForestry-or-fallacy-of-light-burning.pdf
Ingold, T. (2011). Ancestry, generation, substance, memory land. In The Perception
of the Environment (1st ed., pp. 132–151). Routledge.
Jeannette Armstrong - Human Relationship as Land Ethic | Bioneers. (2014,
December 19). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=qwNoX3MNisE
Juma, C. (2019). Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies
(Reprint ed.). Oxford University Press.
Latour, B., Stengers, I., Tsing, A., & Bubandt, N. (2018). Anthropologists Are
Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse. Ethnos, 83(3), 587–
606. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703
Le Guin, U. K. (1989). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In Dancing at the Edge of
the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1st ed., pp. 149–154). Grove Pr.
https://www.deveron-projects.com/site_media/uploads/leguin.pdf
Pyne, S. J. (2019). Fire: A Brief History (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (second
edition). University of Washington Press.
Rael, R., & San Fratello, V. (2017). Clay Bodies: Crafting the Future with 3D
Printing. Architectural Design, 87(6), 92–97. https://doi.org/10.1002/
ad.2243
Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious
transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25.
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Singleton, W. (2018). Holding Space, Embracing Place. Studio Potter, 46(1), 31–35.
Stuckey, P. (2010). Being Known by a Birch Tree: Animist Refigurings of Western
Epistemology. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 4(3), 182–
205. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v4i3.182

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Tsing, A. L. (2017). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins (Illustrated ed.). Princeton University Press.
Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (2017). Arts of Living on a
Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (3rd ed.). Univ Of
Minnesota Press.
Verbeek, P. (2005). What Things Do (Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency,
and Design) (1st ed.). Penn State University Press.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2010). What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology,
Agency, and Design (Summary). RTS.RESEARCH! http://www.
realtechsupport.org/UB/WBR/texts/Veerbeck_WhatThingsDo_2010.pdf
White, R. (2020, February 28). Reseeding the Food System –. Emergence Magazine.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/reseeding-the-food-system/

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Image List

All images included in this document were taken by Avi Farber ©
For enjoyment within this document. For external use with permission only.
Fig. 1: The Groundhog wood-fired kiln in Tres Piedras, NM. (2019)
Fig. 2: A series of pots I made in New Mexico with local clays, paired with the
landscapes they were inspired by. (2019)
Fig. 3: A sleepy potter firing a wood-kiln in the early morning hours. Tres Piedras,
NM. (2018)
Fig. 4: A nice wall. An adobe house in Santa Fe, NM. (2018)
Fig. 5: The view above my mom’s house where I grew up sledding. Santa Fe, NM.
(2019)
Fig. 6: The view from Lilly Point, Point Roberts, Washington standing above the clay
deposit I found during this project. (2020)
Fig. 7: One of my first 3d printed flasks made with clay from Point Roberts. Un-fired
clay. (2020)
Fig. 8: The view of a tree Ronald Rael lined up with the window of his 3D printed
adobe structure. La Jara, CO. (2020)
Fig. 9: A box outside of my studio containing the Cerambot 3D printer kit. Taos, NM.
(2020)
Fig. 10: My second version of a 3D printed ceramic flask. Un-fired clay. (2020)
Fig. 11: A backhoe hoists a ceramic 3d printer above Ronald Rael’s structures. La Jara,
CO. (2020)
Fig. 12: A view of the mud mixture that Ronald Rael uses to print his structures. La
Jara, CO. (2020)
Fig. 13: Coils in the sun. Part of Ronald Rael’s structures. La Jara, CO. (2020)
Fig. 14: Firefighters on my first crew, the Red River Fire Chasers taking a rest outside
of Cimarron, NM. (2015)
Fig. 15: A DC 10 air tanker drops a load of slurry, a fire retardant chemical, to slow the
progression of a fire near John Day, OR. (2016)
Fig. 16: Members of my crew, the Mormon Lake Hotshots, walk through a burned
forest at the end of our shift on the Wildcat Fire. North Rim of the Grand
Canyon, AZ. (2016)
Fig. 17: My late friend Dustin Olague looks into a warming fire. Arizona (2016)
Fig. 18: Wildfired flask number 1. 3D printed ceramic. Wildfired. (2020)
Fig. 19: Documenting the ruin of Berry Creek, CA. 120 mm film. (2020)
Fig. 20: Alone with a quite forest on the North Complex Fire. North of Berry Creek,
CA. (2020)

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Photo Stories

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Berry Creek, California

56

Aluminum melted out of a burned car in Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

57

Thinking of kids. Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

58

Downed power lines, blown needles. Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

59

A painting. Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

60

The good old forest trash heap. Sherds of a toilet. Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

61

A road sign shows the intensity with which the fire moved through this area near Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

62

The fire is alive just north of Berry Creek, CA on my drive home. 2020. Avi Farber

63

The residue my body left in the bathtub after documenting Berry Creek, CA. 2020. Avi Farber

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Making 3D Pots

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A 3d printed ceramic flask with a glaze made from ash collected on the North Complex Fire. 2021.
Avi Farber

66

The second iteration of a 3D printed ceramic flask form. I like the box patterning which is an
unexpected artifact of the CAD modeling process. 2020. Avi Farber

67

Integrating the ocean. Experimenting with a sedimentary application of glaze. 2020. Avi Farber

68

From my process documentation notebook. The first steps in learning how to 3d model in CAD and print with a WASP
machine. 2020. Avi Farber

69

Form my process documentation notebook, form finding the second iteration. 2020. Avi Farber

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The Cerambot 3D printer kit arrives. 2020. Avi Farber

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My local machinist Mr. Archuletta helps me fix the lead screw that came improperly designed for
my Cerambot 3D printer. As I watch his skilled hands work, he ask me how he can learn how to
use CAD programs. I try to dissuade him. There is something really nice about working with your
hands. Often it’s nicer to let your body do the thinking Taos, NM. 2020. Avi Farber

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Mixing and Loading. Preparing clay to print. 2020. Avi Farber

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Working with clay from Abiquiu, NM that I mixed too wet. 2020. Avi Farber

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This happened a lot. Making a tall slender vessel was technically challenging. At this point I was
learning how to balance the machines flow rate, print speed, nozzle size, and clay consistency.
2020. Avi Farber

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Material test of clay from Point Roberts, Washington. 2020. Avi Farber

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Hank Saxe meets the Cerambot. Taos, NM. 2020. Avi Farber

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A flask made with a special blend of clay. A collaboration with Hank Saxe. Discovering that each
clay and machine gives the design a unique look. Taos, NM. 2020. Avi Farber

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A flask placed to be fired on the North Complex Fire. It’s still out there somewhere. California.
2020. Avi Farber

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A fire hydrant in Point Roberts, WA that highlights the quirky patriotism in this pene-exclave.
2020. Avi Farber

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Crumbling adobe houses near Ronald Rael’s place outside of La Jara, CO. 2020. Avi Farber

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An analog 3D clay pot. Making the 3D modeling shape by hand. Coiled micacious clay in the evening sun. Taos, NM.
2020. Avi Farber

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