The controversial naming of “wild” clay
On wild, nauseating priorities
You have probably read here and there on the controversy of the name “wild clay”: this mostly focuses around the fact that both wild and commercial clay are just clay, that there’s no chemical difference between something you buy and something you dig, that commercial clays are actually also wild in origin and that “it’s illegal” and “you should always ask for landowner permission”. While some of these things might be true and others factually debatable, I really don’t think it’s a matter that needs this much importance.
It’s 2026, Palestine is still bombed daily, the zionist state and the US oligarchy are committing war crimes and genocides across several continents, and we are entering or already living in a global mass extinction event that will impact disproportionally most people living on the Earth.
It’s 2026 and several zionist potters take wild clay on Palestinian land. They make videos about it, they test the clays and give them names while they reconnect with nature and thank Mother Earth for providing such plenty full abundance at their naked feet. The stories are well received, what beautiful clays, what beautiful places, what temperature do they fire at, there’s no backlash and no reaction. These people took some buckets and went to dig earth just stolen with blood during a genocide, and then posted videos of their reconnection with nature on instagram and the ceramic community has watched and not raised a single problem with it.
It’s 2026 and on the same platform Josh, Simon and Matthew* from respectively the US, UK and Australia have been fomenting for years with very long and condescending posts, sometimes AI generated, a diatribe on how “wild” is an unethical word. Josh, Simon and Matthew take themselves very seriously and believe this issue is something worth talking about at length, whilst simultaneously being completely silent on literally anything else because either art is above politics either instagram, where we all spend 6 hours a day, is conveniently not the place to talk about politics.
It’s 2026 and Josh, Simon and Matthew, are you ok? How is, today, the ethics of the word “wild clay” the epicentre of your political conscience and morals? What kind of people have such a deranged sense of priorities?
It’s 2026 and it’s unforgivable to be relentlessly vocal about which words we should or shouldn’t use to describe mud from a ditch, yet not show a single ounce of rage for the children and adults that are being killed and their land, wild and not, taken by those who have killed them.
We really can’t find anything else to protest, denounce or debate as ceramicists, potters or artists working in a field extremely complicit with zionism, from bootlickers galleries surviving on dirty recycled money to museums operating as propaganda tools for the western capitalist class, a field built on classism and elitism where if you are not born rich and well connected you continuously struggle to stay afloat or you may never even enter?
It is unfortunately a telling sign that, while being among those who work directly with the land, we spend much energy on such trivial unimportant issues while people, cultures and ecosystems around us are being violently wiped from existence.
It’s even worst because it’s not really the word “wild”, its etymology or attached cultural value that has vexed and turned apart the soul or lack of of many of these potters, mostly old, mostly men, mostly white, mostly anglo-saxon, in the past few years. More precisely, it’s the fact that it has become a popular practice, a marketing tool and it has somehow escaped their elitist snobbish control. They actually coined the word while most of the new generation of potters were infant or not yet born and framed it as a different practice from other ways of obtaining materials, one that was harder and more knowledgeable. They invented nothing new, like most of us, but gave a name to it which initially sounded dreamy to their mostly urban clientele. They put in place a fantasy, a hierarchy of materials and a hierarchy of making that were fine up until it remained a pretentious niche, but now that it’s “trendy” and there are too many potters making vessels from wild clay (because unlike what they keep saying, it’s really not that hard and has been done for around 30 thousands years) their practice seem less distant, magical or serious.
And they find this tragic.
Whilst I think we should keep bothering old white anglo-saxon men unconcerned by genocide and occupation, the fact that we keep devolving this single word so much attention, in such an empty performative and punctilious way, makes me honestly disgusted.
Does the word “wild” bother you so much?
Please just find another word. It’s your mother tongue and it seems like the least you could do. You colonised half of the world so that now we all have to learn English, find an acceptable proper polite word that you like and let’s move on.
*These names are a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.