Porcelain pages
Mud glaze
Cone 10 reduction fire
The book is an ongoing archive of Mud and Sludge, vitrified to glaze on white porcelain pages through the process of ceramic firing.
In the selection of mud samples – no distinction is made between substances that are anthropogenic or natural, industrial or cultural, real or mythical in their origins – only that they have acquired an almost totemic importance through their entanglements with our material world.
Black mud, anaerobic silt, sludge, soft and slimy to the touch, rich in minerals, putrefaction and bacterial swarms – is matter we tend to stay away from. The first embracing gesture towards this substance was a depiction of an alchemical allegory in the Splendor Solis manuscripts ( 1582), in the form of a dark figure emerging from a spillage of mud. Here the putrefaction, “blackening” or “nigredo” is celebrated as the initial and most difficult stage in the alchemical transmutation of matter. Alchemists believed that all ingredients needed to be cleansed and cooked until they became a uniform black matter, the prima materia, as the first step before creating something new and luminous.
In a similar way these dark substances reveal a surprising iridescence and an array of colours through firing and the ceramic process of vitrification. The Book of Mud Relics is an ongoing discovery of the hidden chemistries revealed through colour, a telling of the history of this overlooked substance and the bio-geo-chemical trails it gathers.
List of Mud Relics
- Lithium mud, Salton Sea Geothermal Field
- Mythic Doggerland remains, North Sea
- Abandoned copper mine sludge, Uganda
- Anoxic mud / algae matt, Salton Sea sediments
- Magnetite silt, Lake Michigan
- Marina City sediments, Chicago
Collected by Berenika Boberska, 2022 – 2024 ongoing
Splendor Solis
