Benita
Laylim
Why do you have your maps set to satellite view?
I'm frequently asked this question when people look at my phone app. It so baffles me.
How do people navigate Sydney in pastel grey blocks and yellow lines? In default mode, straightedge blocks of mint green replace multicoloured greenery. A singular cornflower blue supplants the myriad hues of waterways and beaches. So many details are absent —the shapes of buildings, the appearance of individual trees, the interplay of light... You can't see the snaking movement of the rivers, how the built environment is tangled along them and piled onto the ridges and flats. You can't see the brown tiled roofs of suburbia, the light grey of the industrial zones, the gradients of the land, the currents in the harbour. Everything is reduced and standardised — everything is missing.
During the Covid-19 lockdowns in Sydney I, like many others, lost employment and was tightly confined to my suburban environs. I spent a lot of time reflecting on how landscape holds collective and individual memory and identity, and how often precious relics of heritage and communities seem to get trampled on in this city.
Using found clay from four sites across Sydney: Kurnell, Pigface Point (East hills), Redfern and Malabar, the idea for this project took form in thinking about how I could integrate elements of place (the local clays) into works that reflect thoughtfully upon the site from which they come. Considering how uncovering layered histories might inform my process, and how each place brings something different to my experience of the world.
Excerpt from research paper
Much of Western self-perception seems to rest on Descartes’ solipsism ‘I think therefore I am’ (although, as Rosi Braidotti points out, ‘I shop therefore I am’ [1][2] may now be a more appropriate refrain). In contrast, an Aboriginal perspective says, ‘I am located therefore I am’. Kumbamerri [3] philosopher Mary Graham expounds on this idea in an essay on Aboriginal philosophy, which she summarises with two axioms: ‘The land is the law. You are not alone in the world[4].’ In this vein people are defined first by their relationship to land, and secondly by their relationships with other people. This ordering asserts a custodial ethic; the environment is not a backdrop to our existence, but something we have a relationship with and a responsibility to maintain. Graham points out that how we treat the land acts as a blueprint for how we treat each other, it is what ‘determines our human-ness’[5]. She says ‘the world is immediate, not external, and we are all its custodians, as well as its observers’[6].
[1] Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK ; Polity Press, 2006),3.
[2] Braidotti is making reference to Barbara Krugers 1987 artwork, “I shop therefore I am”
[3] Indigenous clan of the Gold Coast region.
[4] Mary Graham, “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 3 (January 1, 1999): 105–18, https://doi.org/10.1163/156853599X00090,181.
[5] Graham, 182
[6] Graham, 193
Process
Processing clay is incredibly slow when done by hand. First the collected chunks are broken down into small pieces and left to dry out. Once dry, the clay crumble is placed in a bucket and covered in water to slake – that is, to break down and form a slurry. I often let it sit for a number of days, giving it the occasional stir.
The slurry is then sieved to catch organic matter – sticks, rocks, and any other debris, and then poured onto plaster slabs to dry.
Once the clay has dried to the right consistency, it's kneaded, bagged, and preferably left to sour, like a cheese.
However many of the works were made from completely unprocessed clay – by knitting together chunks as they came directly from the ground. The shape of these works were greatly informed by the clay's inconsistencies, following the ridges and grooves present in the material. Cracks naturally appeared in the firing, due to this nonuniform chemical structure, with some works falling apart altogether.
Bio
Benita is a multidisciplinary artist working predominantly in ceramics. Her honours project uses found clays from across Greater Sydney to explore stories of place and ecocentric ways of thinking. She makes handmade functional ware at her pottery studio in Marrickville, called chūn.