Tracing extinction lines:
Witnessing with heat
‘With heat, it is possible to figure change not as a progression but as material transformation’

Denise Ferreira da Silva (2018)


Ceramics is an elemental practice. Clay is earth, composed of organic and inorganic matter, bound together by water and electrostatic force. It forms over millions of years as rock is weathered by water and transformed by the acid that plants release through their roots. After being moulded by heat-releasing human labour, it is fired, transitions through various crystallisation phases and, through extreme heat, undergoes an irreversible change into a new material — ceramics.

Just as ceramics is elemental in force, it is also elemental on a molecular scale. Of the 118 elements on the Periodic Table, 61 are significant to ceramic processes due to the composition of clay, its mineral and physical properties and the conditions during firing, such as the presence or absences of oxygen in a kiln and the combustion and decomposition of organics components. These 61 chemical elements are also the determining factors in the aesthetics of ceramic glazes, their colour and texture revealed through the elemental force of heat.

When brought into a contemporary artistic and ecological research practice, ceramics offers the possibility of critically investigating and expressing elemental insights into deep geologic time — as well as much more recent stories of entwined human and environmental histories that, throughout the period of modernity, have escalated into planetary-wide crises.

By witnessing ‘with heat’ through the ceramic process, Manchester Driftwood, Forest and Chicxulub investigate the cataclysms of past extinction events, as well as our current environmental crises amidst the Sixth Mass Extinction and so-called Anthropocene. These three artworks all derive from sites with histories of intense earth-altering heat, each marking a phase of climate crisis and extinction. All three are watery sites today — the rivers and canals of Manchester in the UK, the sludgy coal ash dams of Australian’s East Coast power stations and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, on the western margin of the Atlantic Ocean.