Making Clay Containers for Stories Yet to Come

The idea behind this little clay tube is pretty simple. Make something from the earth beneath our feet, fire it in a pit, and see if it can help us keep a few stories safe for the future.

It’s not fancy. It’s rough around the edges, a little uneven, and definitely not the kind of ceramic piece you’d find sitting behind glass in a gallery. That’s exactly what we wanted. This is one of our low-effort test pieces, made with locally harvested clay from Borups Corners, here in Melgund Township. We’ve been spending the last few months playing around with local clays and ceramics, figuring out what the material can do and what happens when we put it through different processes.

This time, we’re making tubes. The plan is to pit fire these simple forms and see how well they hold up. We’re interested in whether they might work as little containers for birch bark scrolls, small art pieces, and stories we want to leave behind. There’s something interesting about the idea of making a container out of the same ground that surrounds us, then using it to hold something made by hand. The clay doesn’t have to be perfect. The tube doesn’t have to be beautiful.

It just has to work. And maybe that’s the point!

We’ve been thinking a lot about how stories move through time, how things get passed along, and what it means to make art that might outlast us. A birch bark scroll tucked inside a clay tube is a pretty modest thing. But it gives us a way to think about the future, about the people who might come across these objects years from now, and about what they might find meaningful in the things we’re making today.

For now, we’re keeping things simple. Harvesting clay, making test pieces, trying things out, and seeing what happens. There’s plenty more to come as we continue our local clays and ceramics studies here in Melgund Township.