Ceramics in the wild: Deep mapping and the moon jars of Adam Buick

Abstract

Creative encounters with topography and attempts to record and represent the patina of place become of growing importance as we find ways to explore human impact on our environment and to foreground the role of craft as a geo-intervention. Ceramicist Adam Buick maintains an inherently physical connection with the landscape as he walks through the local environment and as he digs for clay and collects materials. His process forms a series of deep maps, which emerge through his ceramic work. Both a concept and a practice, ‘deep mapping’ refers to an approach in which artists, scientists and scholars attempt to capture the different meanings and textures that are associated with particular places. This article discusses the potential of deep mapping as a craft research methodology. To do so, it takes as a case study Earth to Earth (2011–12), in which Buick documents the weathering away of his raw clay moon jar using time-lapse photography. His resulting film and photographic stills tell a story of movement, time and evolution. Buick’s jars draw attention to the matter we manipulate as being subject to its own environmental conversations and witnessing of change. The deep map offers the potential for a methodology that embraces multiplicity, simultaneity and complexity, encouraging a spatially facilitated understanding of our craft stories and products. Framed as a conversation and not a statement, deep maps are inherently unstable, continually unfolding and changing in response to new data and new insights. More than a collapsed or failed pot, Buick’s jars are a deep map of an adventure.