The vessels receiving project came full circle with this following piece, re-lining. At the beginning of my stay at Finca Morada, we cleaned the metal pool, flipped it over, and activated the space underneath to hold a pit fire for the terracotta and redart vessels. Once the pit fire was complete, we re-filled the hole and placed the metal pool back into place. 

Chris scraped out the lining, and I re-built it. 

re-lining, 2022

kaolin, metal pool

scraped

watered

lifted

revealed

opened

burned

watered

filled

lots of sitting with

I have continued to reclaim the same four buckets of kaolin since 2020- including kaolin from garden, hose. This kaolin is living, accumulating its own history from the environments it is reclaimed in and for. 

For eight hours, I sat in this metal pool lining the floor, beginning from the edges of the walls. Grabbing chunks of kaolin, I went around in a circle. Eight hours was my body's capacity. In this metal pool for eight hours I sat in silence, listening only to the sounds coming from the environment around me. It initially started out as a very meditative process, and then it became unbearable. Re-lining, re-building was-IS- hard. Starting over again. Reclaiming, rebuilding, and redefining is grueling as it is one of the most incredible and beautiful processes one can go through. I looked up at Chris, sobbing, because I couldn't do it all at once. In my practice I'm supposed to be exploring how to let go, but sometimes it feels nearly impossible to do. 

I let the kaolin dry overnight. It cracked as the water evaporated from it, feeling the tension between its body and the metal surface underneath it as it shrunk in the drying process. 

These pieces of kaolin have been collected and will be reclaimed again for the future.

Upon removing the kaolin from the metal pool, traces of the clay were left along the wall of the metal pool, as well as on the floor it laid on. I sat in the middle of the pool and took a consecutive loop images of this residue.