Flightlines: conversations about life with clay

This article was first published in the annual Journal of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. The NCECA Journal is a benefit of membership in the world’s largest organization dedicated to clay, creation, teaching, and learning. Learn more at https://nceca.net/

Ceramics and clay can be a container of thoughts, conversations, and a range of experiences (Tilley, 2006; O’Neill, 2018). Making with ceramics, is not simply about object-based production and exhibition but allows exploration of inner life, the private, intimate, and everyday experience to become manifest. For women, it is also about generosity-juggling the strands and demands of life through collaboration, interweaving human relationships. This has resulted in the evolution of extraordinary practices which intersect themes from the studio and life such as ceramics and permaculture / trail-running / trauma / wellbeing / folklore / midwifery. Flightlines gives focus to these intersections and the nature of hospitality and open-endedness that make their exploration through clay possible. Through facilitating a series of dialogical conversations, we have gained insight into ways in which women ceramicists interweave their practice and lives in incredible ways, and through reflecting on and through these conversations, we (the group of co-authors and contributors) offer new ways forward for others.