The Potters Pledge - as written by Clay Matters
The Potters Pledge was formed during the pandemic by a group of Potters wanting to open up discourse re the Climate Emergency we were facing as a humanity. We wanted to share and learn together how to support each other, as a community. What was our footprint? How could we lessen it?
As clay workers we touch the earth everyday. in the making of our functional and sculptural forms we are connecting to billions of years of history as clay passes through our hands.
We advocate for the social and cultural benefits arising from our ceramic practices and subsequently pass to those who acquire our works for daily use and/or contemplation into the future.
Our active choice to work with clay carries with it a responsibility to respect the earth's finite resources by identifying where material are sourced, how they are transported and processed, and to minimise the negative social and environmental impacts of their consumption in our studios.
We pledge to make informed sustainable and ethical choices concerning the materila and energy required to craft our work with respect for environmental consequences.
We acknowledge and pay our respects to the counry on which we create and to aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples who have never ceded ownership.
We acknowledge that sustainability is not a new concept for the first nations people and that areas of thinking sustainably are built on indigenous thinking and practice.
This group continues to meet on a regular basis and is constantly coming up with ways to draw awareness. We share resources, books read, podcasts listened to, and contribute to the National quarterly publication magazine by The Australian Ceramics Association. As a newbie to ceramics (8 years is new) this has been a great source of information and community. We face an enormous can of worms trying to figure out the footprint of our clays and glaze materials, and this will be a long journey. Meanwhile I try to make sustainable choices with what I do have an influence over, and participate in discussions when I can.
