Soundscape | 2023 — ongoing | clay sound archive | sounds created with the assistance of Ryan Danley

Soundscape emerges from working with clay while embedding a contact microphone to capture its sounds. These sounds, archived here, correspond to actions performed with the clay. The clay’s voice resonates with the vibrations of my trembling hand and the materiality of the tools involved. I listen to clay’s reverberation, its vibrancy, and its sonic potential. This practice creates kinship with the material, as its voice guides me through intra-actions alongside it.

Feed | participatory performance | Practice as Research Performance Salon (P.a.R.P.S.) | Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts | University of California Davis | Davis, California | 2023 | sounds were created with the assistance of Ryan Danley

The clay prepares to receive the form of a vessel. The bodies lie together. Approach them. Take one in your hands, as I have. Your clay is ready, yet you see that preparation involves muscular coordination of the hands: squeezing, opening, contracting, and expanding as the clay molds into a rounded shape, filling the hollow of the palms. This space becomes a site of rhythm, as the hands open and suspend the clay, creating a momentum of rolling, rounding, and rotating—a loop, a rhythmic choreography. The pressure between your hands is just enough to shape, compress, and keep the clay in motion without flattening or distorting it beyond the image of a sphere. Cradle the clay within a network of interlaced fingers, weaving one hand's fingers as intentional weft into the other’s. Bring the crowns of your thumbs together. Use this flexible net to support the clay’s outer form as your thumbs press deeply into the center. Slide your thumbs out to reveal a half clover, turn the clay a half turn, and repeat to shape a full clover. You may hear a faint crack as an air pocket bursts under the press—a turbulent moment of pressing through. Should you wish to try a different method to form the vessel’s space, explore other parts of your body that offer the negative space of a vessel, such as the elbow’s protrusion, the knee’s gentle curve, or the heel bone’s spherical shape. Impressing the clay onto a body’s contour becomes an act of colliding, crashing, and surrendering, an attentive act that invites the warmth and tremor of the body to shape the clay in its own reversed image. Vessels need walls to sustain their holding potential. Hands pinch these walls, speaking to one another in a coordinated rhythm around the form. Touch allows for the simultaneous acts of speaking and listening, as hands feel the walls' thickness and consistency. Pinching becomes a dialogue between the consistency of your own actions and the form’s thickness. Place the clay vessel in the hollow of one hand, a cushioned space mirroring the vessel’s shape, while the thumb of the opposite hand rests on your wrist, keeping both hands balanced and coordinated, forming a whole entity beyond the body's lateral divide. With stability, use the soft roundedness of your pointer finger’s knife edge to compress the rim of the vessel. This pressure mirrors our beginning—an affective force that preserves the shape formed. Use the fingertip or thumb pad to smooth the vessel’s sides, pressing the rim to echo the lips as they meet the mouth’s inner edge. With your vessel prepared, it is time to carry it to the water I hold in readiness—a culmination of a political act. Dip the vessel into the water in an angular descent, allowing it to fill. Bring this nurturing element to my mouth, shedding our unconscious proximity's habits and rewriting our shared stories in a boundless form of touch. Return the clay to the bucket to be prepared once more.