Wild Clay

Processing some freshly-dug Virginia clay

 

Work of late has been limited to surveying large parcels of land with hardly an artifact in sight. The monotony is broken, along with the skin, by thorny greenbriar and whip-like woody brush. Also, there has been the chance to gather and try some raw clay.

The gray clay comes out of the ground relatively plastic and willing to be rolled into snakes over a foot long. The orange-red material would do likewise, were it not choked with quartz sand. In fact, I found both to be composed of 10-20% clear quartz together with the usual roots and debris.

Having brought samples home, I sliced each batch into 1/2" slabs. Leaving the plastic bags of clay in the freezer overnight, I tossed each color in its own bucket of hot water in the morning and stirred till they became a slurry. Next, I passed them through a sieve made from window screen, the top of a 5-gallon plastic bucket, and  the edge of the bucket lid. The liquid clay was collected in another container to settle out while the sand was discarded. Both the gray and red clay held the same clear quartz, but the size of the grains in the gray must have been larger. With just this relatively coarse screening, the gray was rendered into a very fine slip, which took a long while to settle out.

The red clay was settled out in a day, at which point I poured off the clear water and poured the slurry into an old t-shirt before mounding it on top of a thick plaster bat to dry to a knead-able consistency. The resulting clay is very sticky but quite plastic. It is not, however, fond of being thrown to too thin a cross-section and tends to crack. A few attempts at thin-walled cups (1/4- 1/8") split at the rims. The teapot below was a test of the material in its pure state. The handle was turned on the wheel as the clay would not be pulled longer than 4 inches.  The addition of another clay body will probably go  long way to solving the cracking problem.

Still a bit stubborn (lid cracked before I could get a pic) but not bad for having been a foot deep in a field four days earlier. The sweetgum ball seemed an appropriate finial and I may make a poison ivy sprig mold for the handle terminii.