Clay: A Human History
by Jennifer Lucy Allan
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Description
"A human history told through clay--and how it has shaped us from ancient times to the present day. This book is a love letter to clay, the material that is at the beginning, middle and end of all of our lives; that contains within it the eternal, the elemental, and the everyday. People have been taking handfuls of earth and forming them into their own image since human history began. Human forms are found everywhere there was a ceramic tradition, and there is a ceramic tradition everywhere show more there was human activity. The clay these figures are made from was formed in deep geological time. It is the material that God, cast as the potter, uses to form Adam in Genesis. Tomb paintings in Egypt show the god Khum at a potter's wheel, throwing a human. Humans first recorded our own history on clay tablets, the shape of the characters influenced by the clay itself. The first love poem was inscribed in a clay tablet, from a Sumerian bride to her king more than 4000 years ago. Born out of a desire to know and understand the mysteries of this material, the spiritual and practical applications of clay in both its micro and macro histories, A Human History is a book of wonder and insight, a hybrid of archaeology, history and lived experience as an amateur potter." -- show lessTags
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- Original publication date
- 2025-03-04
- Epigraph
- What I want to say to you here about our selves… arises out of my experiences with physical substance in the transformations of clay, out of my experiences of language, out of my dreams and my deeds, out of my sense of touc... (show all)h and my experience of death. -- M.C. Richards, Centering
What else can tell you about human life more than a pot does? -- Magdalene Odundo, The Journey of Things - Dedication
- For Madelaine
- First words
- Clay is earth locked in a cycle with water and air that is only broken when we surrender it to fire.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Breakages are assured and restoration seems unlikely, but if we repair the things we make, we might just be around in the future, connected to our past by the earth we have formed and fired, and that can carry the weight of our human history.
- Publisher's editor
- Brackstone, Lee
- Blurbers
- Higgie, Jennifer; Bunyan, Vashti; May, Katherine; Gadsby, Florian; Eno, Brian
- Original language
- English
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Statistics
- Members
- 24
- Popularity
- 1,107,225
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
