Clare Wilkening – A Conversation With Nature Through Ceramics

Please introduce yourself as a potter and your pottery practice.

What type of pottery do you do? Why did you get into pottery? What do you love about it?

I am an emerging ceramic artist with a focus on ecologies, human and non-human, and the major and subtle linkages therein. In my work I utilize ceramic forms to evoke, narrate, and to respond to specific places and ecological issues. I make wheel-thrown tableware, coil-built animal sculptures, and large-scale tile installations.

I choose to work primarily in ceramics because of the material’s direct connection to the ground, which has inherent power and meaning. I uncover that by choosing a material that can be a bridge between the topic of my work, the object that is the work, and the substrate of our existence. We are all subjects of the ground, and the ground is subjected to all of us.

This spring, we’ve been talking with artists about our theme Conversations With Nature. Nature and the environment seem to play a big role in your artwork.

How do you bring nature into your work? Why is nature important to you?

The impulses and ideas for my work begin with a broad love for the natural world. I relish the experiences I have had within the felt world of ecology, and I try to bring forth that spirit of creative intuition, play and levity in my working processes. Nature is where my heart is at peace. I feel that non-human life has inherent value, and that connection with nature can bring a richness to our lives that we wouldn’t otherwise know.

Much of my artwork parallels and expands upon my BSc in Environmental Science and the information and knowledge I gained during that time. By choosing to engage with ecology as an artist instead of as a scientist, I am able to research the many topics that hold my attention and to generate work that is evocative and responsive. My goal is to address the social aspects of ecological degradation by offering arts-based ways of portraying whole systems and broad, inclusive thinking that puts ecological health ahead of industrial extraction.

How does your work reflect your thoughts and feelings about nature?

Are there issues/things you’re trying to comment on or bring attention to through your artwork? What do you hope to achieve? 

In my work, I wish to challenge the gesture of sustainability beyond its current cultural logic: a means to maintain resource levels for future extraction at worst, and as a buzzword at best. I would like to shift environmental thinking from the language of sustainability and efficiency towards engagement in reciprocal and regenerative care. Much of the thinking and practice around reciprocity with nature has been done by Indigenous scholars and artists, and I have been fortunate enough to have this decolonial discourse play a heavy role in my education. My positionality as a settler making art within which land and water are actants is an ongoing dialogue within my work.

In this installation there is a ceramic tile representing each actual Southern Resident killer whale. Each whale is individually sculpted and painted with accurate dorsal markings, and has their name, pod, and scientific ID number stamped into the tile. Mothers and their calves appear together on the same tile, as well as sometimes other close relatives. Other tiles are flat and covered with glaze or text bringing context to the ecology of the species. There are currently 186 tiles in the work. The whales are assembled across the surface of the work according to the family groups that they swim with in the real-world. The viewer sees the entire Southern Resident population swimming over the ocean.

For me, thinking about them out there, living their lives in matrilineal, non-material societies, gives me a feeling of peace when life in this city overwhelms me. But of course they bear the brunt of our hyper-consumer lives. I try to convey all this with these tiles. I am continually updating the tiles with the births and deaths in the population, and plan to do so for the rest of my lifetime. Hopefully it will be an exercise in watching their lives grow and thrive, rather than dwindle and flicker out. I started this project on the day that I heard over the radio that BC’s Selkirk Mountain Caribou herd had gone extinct. This project is a gesture of hope and action towards that same day never occurring for the Southern Residents.

The project can be seen online at clarewilkening.com/orca-tiles, and I try to get it up in public around Vancouver and the Salish Sea as often as I can.

You’ve recently done an artist residency at Tidal Art Centre on the Sunshine Coast.

How did that experience come to be? How does your art tie in with a place like Tidal?

My artist residency at Tidal Art Centre in Lund came to be because the Director of the Centre saw my whale tile project and invited me to apply for the residency, which I did. Tidal is a beautiful restored Forest Ranger building, overlooking Finn Bay, that has been turned into art studios and a gallery.

Waking up there every morning for two months, and seeing the ocean first thing, was wonderful fodder for my practice. I started making large coil-built animal sculptures while I was there: humpback whales lunge-feeding, grizzly bears fishing for salmon, and loons. I learned to raku fire. It has been wonderful to expand my practice into a whole new type of working, a new way of making about the Salish Sea.

Aside from Lucky Bats, what are your favourite pottery tools?

I love Xiem’s scratch tool for carving clay, and their bevel cutter for cutting slabs. I use Mudtools’ flexible ribs for throwing, as well as generic yellow coin sponges and a shammy for rims. My favourite clay knife is the Dolan DPT220, and I love Dolan trimming tools as well. I also trim with a Mudtools small shredder blade.

For decorating and hand-building, I love the Shimpo BW-25LC banding wheel, that will be my next pottery equipment purchase.