Thinking Through Clay: Considering the Work of Prairie Artists Rebecca La Marre, KC Adams, and Amy Snider

I love the portrait of Rebecca La Marre on her business card. Her face, almost in rapture, is looking up; her hands are stretched out, a split second away from catching a falling clay cup. Will she miss it? It’s an adrenaline punch that captures the risk and experimentation La Marre embraces in her work. La Marre is part of a fresh wave of Prairie artists, including KC Adams and Amy Snider, who are exploring clay production. Their research is varied, from seeking connection through mentorship and fostering community dialogue to sourcing local materials, but across their work, clay transmutes into an experiential language, a methodology for contemplation, and a path to a new lived reality.

I first met Rebecca La Marre at ParkArt, an annual summer craft sale and fundraiser held by Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, where she was selling a selection of her clay-based work. During our conversation, La Marre shared with me that she didn’t start her art practice working in ceramics. Initially, she was focused on writing and performance. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London in the U.K. in 2012, and was working as commissioning editor for E.R.O.S Journal when she decided to return to Canada. She had already established a prestigious international resumé—publishing in journals and periodicals such as the Organism for Poetic Research, Poetry is Dead, and Through Europe; lectures in Sweden and Tunisia; collaborative performances and exhibitions with Serpentine Gallery, MOMA PS1, and the Darling Foundry—but she found she needed a change. Moving back to Ontario in 2015, La Marre reconnected with family, and her aunt suggested they both spend time with La Marre’s grandmother in her pottery studio. And that, La Marre says, was revelatory: “when I started working with clay I realized this is the best I’ve ever felt in an art-making context. I want to do this all the time.”¹

I was curious about the journey La Marre took as she integrated hands-on clay production into her more conceptual practice, which is guided by an interest in phenomenology, in particular investigating how ritual, desire, and technologies such as language can shape our experiences and bodies. In my research, I found an interview La Marre gave to Women’s Studio Workshop in 2017, which gives a lovely insight into her methodology, and reveals the complex interweaving of making and thinking in her work.² She spoke about several projects that brought her to Vancouver at that time, and a residency with WSW ceramics studio. Part of her work was focussed on making bowls for a fundraiser. As La Marre recounts:

For my writing practice I follow a daily exercise from The Artist’s Way where I write three pages of whatever is in my head. When I got here, I found a book in the clay library, Finding One’s Way with Clay, by a dancer who became a potter. He applies dance practice to making a pinch pot every day and connects the exercise to Jean Genet’s begging bowls. Genet’s begging bowls are a pot in the shape of a need you want to fill in your life. Since I had to make chili bowls every day, I saw an opportunity to make my daily bowl and think about making as a daily meditation.³

During the rest of her residency, La Marre produced several bodies of work, including a set of clay tablets to be used for writing exercises. Initially inspired by the ancient Mesopotamian Cuneiform system of symbolic writing impressed into wet clay, La Marre developed a series of personal-size, dry-erase tablets, using high-fire stoneware paper clay and whiteboard emulsion. La Marre debuted the tablets at the Vancouver Art Book Fair in a workshop she led on writing, inviting students to try the tablets as an exercise to clear the mind. The impermanence of the whiteboard surface encouraged participants to write their thoughts freely without concern for posterity.⁴ Through sharing this exploration with her students, La Marre lays bare the relationship between expression, process, and material.

 My conversation with La Marre continued later that summer when we met over Zoom to talk more about her process. She compared learning to throw on the wheel with studying piano. Both practicing clay forms and musical scales, she said, are about “building up muscle memory, learning the technical components before experimenting, and then once your hands are fluent, you can begin to be expressive.”⁵ She also discussed the historical division in Western culture between art and craft:

“A book, a clay pot, a song played on the piano—can they all be the same thing?…In Western thought there is a very distinct line between function and art. Questions on craft and art are wrapped up with that. In Japan, food and the presentation of food on a plate is as much an artwork as something you have seen in a gallery; whereas in the West, from a Hegelian or Christian approach, there is a sense of corruption or abjection with anything related to the body, and the decay of the body.”⁶

As La Marre explained, with this philosophical rejection of the body and the knowledge gained from our senses, there arises a mistrust of experiential learning, and a binary develops between mind and body which becomes the foundation for the Western hierarchy of fine art over craft, mental and spiritual over physical and experiential.

In her own practice, La Marre continues to expand her research and technical skills by participating in residencies and studio classes, which afford her the opportunity to utilize their facilities and connect with regional guilds and artists. While in Montreal, La Marre studied with Marie Côté at les Ateliers 6235, whose interdisciplinary practice includes: throwing, using clay slip as a drawing medium, installation, and collaborative performance. Now based in Saskatchewan, La Marre often works out of Ken Wilkinson’s studio in the resort village of Shields. With funding from CARFAC Saskatchewan, she also undertook a mentorship with Rob Froese, a master potter and ceramic artist who has worked in clay over three decades, moving between Saskatchewan and Japan. La Marre and Froese connected through his approach to pottery, which is not based on a favourite clay body or kiln style but combines strong, formal throwing skills with an open-ended, experimental approach to materials. For Froese, there are no mistakes, just opportunities for further inquiry.⁷

During her mentorship with Froese, La Marre created several bodies of work, including When the Pot Breaks, the Potter Laughs (2021), a project with David Stonhouse for AKA artist-run centre which was performed at Nuit Blanche in Saskatoon.⁸ The title is a reference to late 18th-century pottery created by the Pennsylvania Dutch, southern German immigrants to the United States. Their distinctively decorated redware was often inscribed with aphorisms and folk humour, such as “Die Schussel ist von Ert gemacht Wann sie verbricht der Haefner lacht; Dartim nempt sie in acht nehman,” which translates to “The dish is made of earth, when it breaks the potter laughs; therefore take care of it.”⁹ While this warning playfully cautions thrifty care (customers who break their plates make for wealthy potters), it also highlights the material precarity of ceramics. As La Marre explains in her project documentation, the risk of failure is present throughout the journey from wet clay to finished work: “In a year of making, many bowls will collapse, vases will break, greenwares will be dropped and glazes will run. Finished pieces will be knocked off shelves. Colours and textures will not turn out as expected. Kiln firings will stop at the incorrect temperature without explanation.”¹⁰ By approaching an adverse situation as an opportunity, La Marre and Stonhouse turned caution into celebration, beginning with an online “smash or save” auction, and ending with a ceremony in which rejected works were gleefully destroyed at Nuit Blanche. For me, the lesson here is that breaking things is not always to be avoided. By embracing breakage with laughter, La Marre pushes past failure into courageous experiment and creative play, and makes space for new ideas.

La Marre’s joyful relationship with clay reminds me of Winnipeg-based artist and educator KC Adams and how she describes her ceramic practice. Adams is Anishinaabe, Inninew, and British, and through video, installation, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, kinetic art, and ceramics, her practice explores technology in relation to her Indigenous identity and knowledge systems. Adams recently gave an artist talk for Manitoba Craft Council and Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA), entitled “Finding My Miskanow [life-long journey]: Reclaiming my Spirit through Clay,”¹¹ in which she spoke in great depth on her art practice, research, and journey with clay. Like La Marre, Adams’ practice did not initially involve clay. But she recalls her first encounter with the medium as a life-changing experience:

“I did not grow up with my culture, but I felt my ‘blood memory’ was strong within me. For example, the first time I touched clay, which was at Concordia University…the moment I touched clay, it was like coming home. It touched me more than any other medium. I understood it. I excelled in it.”¹²

To Adams, “blood memory” describes her connection to clay as an inheritance, similar to the genetic memory of migration in Monarch Butterflies.¹³

Currently, Adams’ clay practice is immersed in reclaiming and reviving Indigenous pottery methodology, informed by teachings received from Knowledge Keepers, archaeological research, and her own experiments in production.¹⁴ Her interest in historical Indigenous pottery began in 2000 with a class on ancient clay technologies led by Dr. Lee Sims at the Manitoba Museum. The course had good intentions, Adams explained, but since it was taught with commercially prepared clay in the basement of the museum, she felt detached from the cultural context of the course material. It was not until years later, when Adams took a workshop from Grant Goltz¹⁵ —on similar subject matter but led from an Indigenous perspective and facilitated out on the land—that she could feel connections between process, land, and heritage. In the decades since, Adams has worked with Elders and Indigenous artists to gather knowledge and develop a more holistic approach to clay, participating in and leading several land-based learning workshops that incorporate traditional teachings.¹⁶ In her talk for MAWA, Adams also describes making as an essential part of a healthy and well-balanced life, a way of connecting: “from an Indigenous perspective, art is not just for people who are talented. Making art is part of life, a language that talks about the relationship with the land and waters.”¹⁷

This past August, as part of the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art’s Summer Institute, Adams led a 10-day workshop on nibi giikendaaswin (Water Knowledge) for women-identifying and non-binary artists in Grand Rapids, Manitoba. The experience included harvesting clay by hand to create traditional Indigenous water vessels, and studying Anishinaabe teachings that recognize water as life and women as water carriers (beings who can carry life, as well as carry the teachings about water).¹⁸ Adams’ philosophy of art as connection can be seen in the structure of the workshop. Participants began with learning about water through reading texts, walking on the land, and listening to Elders. Then they dug clay, prepared it, and built clay vessels using traditional methods. Adams explained that this approach, learning cultural context as part of production, encouraged the students to more deeply understand their connection to the land and the water, as well as their responsibility to protect all these relations: “It’s looking at a worldview in a different way. Instead of linear, it’s circular…We’re a part of the spider web—we’re not the spider web—and everything around us is a part of it.”¹⁹

KC Adams uses the medium of clay in an intimate way to bring focus to our relationship with the earth, our kinship and responsibility to it, and through this internal dialogue I found myself reflecting on the work of another Prairie artist I recently connected with, Amy Snider. Currently an MFA candidate at the University of Regina, Snider is also a writer and environmental activist. I first saw Snider’s installation Saskatchewan Glacier (2019-2020) in the group exhibition “House on Fire”, which addressed climate change, at the Fifth Parallel Gallery in Regina. Snider’s piece consisted of a series of porcelain cups. Each vessel, roughly the size of a large take-out coffee, was made of snowflake shapes that barely touched. Although referencing functional cups, these clearly could not contain a liquid. Their elegant austerity, almost more idea than object, was incredibly vulnerable; even the delicate process of installing these vessels on a shelf in the gallery had led to flakes breaking off and falling to the floor beneath. The title, Saskatchewan Glacier, refers to the part of the Columbia Icefield²⁰ which melts and flows from the Rocky Mountains into the North Saskatchewan River. When this ice pack melts completely, its loss will certainly exacerbate the drought conditions already present here in the Prairies.²¹ By embodying what seems abstract, our future climate disaster, into a familiar domestic cup shape, Snider is able to bring her concern to us in a visceral way.

The ecosystem in Southern Saskatchewan is semi-arid grassland that has suffered from colonial development in the past century and was compromised to the point of collapse in the 1930s Dust Bowl. The best analysis of this history that I have read was written by Curtis McManus in the book, Happyland. Researching countless government documents, community histories, and newspaper archives, McManus found that the situation of the “Dirty Thirties” was not just the result of drought and financial recession, but a culmination of “a quarter-century of stubborn persistence but also of absurdity, despair, social dislocation, moral corrosion, and inconsistent and often inept government policy.”²² Despite experienced advice against opening the grazing lands in the south-west to intensive farming, federal policy not only encouraged small-scale family farms; they also offered countless subsidy projects in the form of road-building work and grants to encourage failing farmers to stay in the Prairies, despite mounting catastrophes. While this policy explains Saskatchewan’s continued struggles with drought, dams, and irrigation, it also offers an insight into the province’s nickname, “Next Year Country,” a perverse culture of optimism that shifts focus away from present troubles to hope for a better future. 

It was with this history in mind that I visited Amy Snider’s studio this summer to learn more about the context in which she develops her artistic practice. In our discussion, Snider shared that working with ceramics was a decision that she came to mid-career, and that like La Marre and Adams, she feels an intrinsic connection with the material of clay. Snider grew up in Richmond BC, hiking in the Rocky Mountains and swimming in glacial lakes whose milky turquoise colour is the result of suspended clay particles or “rock flour.” For her, these activities were restorative, similar to the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku or forest bathing, in which practitioners take contemplative walks in old-growth forests, connecting with nature through their senses. Returning to the mountains has become an annual tradition Snider depends on, especially swimming in the clay-infused glacial waters.²³ Before her work as an artist, Snider’s first career was in teaching. After earning her BA at the University of Regina and her MA at Carleton in Ottawa, she embarked on world travel, teaching English as an Additional Language (EAL) in Asia. She had just been accepted into a PhD program in literature when life brought her back to Regina. Then, in 2015, although outwardly quite successful in her career, Snider found herself at a breaking point. The stress of work became paralyzing, compounded with a growing awareness of the implications of global warming. Her situation was a profound feeling of what is now understood as eco-anxiety.²⁴ At the time, Snider only knew that she needed to secure a more balanced and meaningful life. During a medical leave from work she joined environmental organizations and took classes in functional ceramics. Her deep concern with the climate change catastrophe has inspired an environmentally-focused research practice and a body of work that reflects what she has learned.

After making her “Glacier” series, Snider continued her reflection on water security and drought, and created a series of unfired bowls and plates entitled “Dust” (2021). These were exhibited as part of “ENDINGS + BEGINNINGS” at Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre (April 10-24, 2021). Snider describes this work as metaphorical, linking humans and human production in the form of pottery with the environmental crisis: “These plates represent the imagined end of ceramics; that they will not survive is their form and content, their fate suggesting our own. Enduring drought will be one of the worst consequences of climate change, and these pieces embody it.”²⁵ Snider made the “Dust” series with locally found clay and materials and, in one instance, incorporated dust from her home. Her intent in using locally sourced material was to physically manifest her concern for and connection to the place where she lives. The fragile nature of these works underscores the gravity of our situation. Snider states, “We need to recognize the urgency with which we must repair our relationship to the land, if that is possible, and if it isn’t too late already.”²⁶

Snider’s newest body of work is building toward a performative installation of papery-thin bisque-fired cups, cast out of slip using clay dug from a friend’s garden. Her vision is to fill an entire floor with over 16,000 of these delicate, potato chip-like forms. At the centre, she will place several large rocks, creating a meditative space for contemplation and self-reflection. She intends to invite visitors into the space, to walk over the cups, and to sit on the rocks. Without a path, their feet will crush the ceramic into dust with each step. Snider is still in the production phase of this work, pouring clay into molds every day. When I visited her studio, she showed me several test pieces and her work in progress, with the working titles Barely and Crushed. Imagining Snider’s future installation, I wonder if I will be able to step onto her fragile clay objects, knowing that they will break under the weight of my steps. I am a mother, and much of my labour each day is spent carefully tending, fixing, and cleaning; I find it hard to deliberately break something. Yet, even as I write these words, I realise that many aspects of my lifestyle impact the environment, causing harm without my conscious intent. It’s a complex situation.

Our technological advancements make it difficult to fully comprehend the materials and methods used to create even everyday objects, a situation that complicates our individual ability to make ethical and considered choices about what we consume. Clay, for example, is a seemingly recognizable material. You may not realize it, but as your hands turn the pages in this magazine, you are touching clay. Kaolin, the white clay used in preparing porcelain, is also used in manufacturing paint, plastics, ceramics, and as a filler and coating in paper.²⁷ As our collective consumption of the earth’s resources increases exponentially, many communities are coming together to fight against the power of industry and capitalism and advocate for the living earth. However, the complexities of global industry and trade are such that without a global consensus for change, we will not be able to shift our ways of life toward sustainability. We are at a point of paradigm shift.

As Snider’s artwork addresses the very real urgency to acknowledge climate change and confront the impending environmental catastrophe, she is often asked about her vision for the future. During our conversation, Snider said that she hesitates to be prescriptive, “I just want people to be able to acknowledge their feelings. I want them to know that it’s ok to have feelings.”²⁸ Reflecting on her words, I see her wisdom as my first defense against anxiety is to suspend my emotions and distract my thoughts with mundane activities like daily chores. The idea that Earth, our home, is irrevocably changing in ways that will endanger life for many of us, and for the generations to come is painful. The reality of collective mortality is difficult to absorb. Snider’s point, however, is that if we refuse to acknowledge problems out of fear and the negative emotions they trigger, we lose the ability to discuss them and find solutions. This is a situation that science writer and journalist Britt Wray articulates well in her book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Wray states:

“We are a fix-it culture. An onwards-and-upwards culture. A progress-and-growth culture. The anxiety around death is precisely so intolerable because we don’t know how to fix it… Once we give permission to difficult feelings, and learn to be with them, we can see what choices we can make in a situation that we all must move on in.”²⁹

Wray argues that feelings of anger, grief and anxiety about the end of our world are completely valid, a healthy response to trouble, and the first step toward coping is engagement. We need to lean into our strong feelings in order to conquer our deeply ingrained desire for denial, even though it will take us to a place of uncertainty. As we work to integrate our emotions with our knowledge, we can begin to envision change and step toward it.

This past summer I have spent considerable time thinking about change and mortality. As I age into my final third of life, I feel new vulnerabilities in concrete ways. What began with a conversation while holding a ceramic cup, and feeling the life within it passed on from the hand that crafted it, has turned into a journey. I feel the fragility of a clay vessel is metaphorical for our shared vulnerability; the precariousness of life, full of vitality yet easily broken. Exploring the methodologies and work that La Marre, Adams, and Snider have created with clay, I can see the way they have opened spaces for connection through craft, and learning through material. I was inspired by what Denise Lebica, the Director for the Fuller Craft Museum wrote on craft as connection, “Craft in the truest, most basic sense is about the human need to make and connect; to bring the root of tradition and the power of the human hand on material and form together; with exploration, and without limitation, to connect us all to the world we live in.”³⁰ The experiences we can find through art and craft–connection, discussion, and reflection–promise reparation and wholeness. Moving forward, especially as the climate crisis continues to reveal itself, we must pursue the things that bring us together, to think and discuss, both globally and in our most intimate spaces. 

Margaret Bessai, B.A. (she/her) is a writer and artist living in Regina, Treaty 4 Territory. Her writing on contemporary visual art has been published nationally. Born and raised in Regina, her family roots are as settlers, homesteading near Southey, SK. She earned a B.A. Advanced in Visual Art at the University of Regina (1993). As a visual artist, Bessai works in drawing and collage. 

1. Rebecca La Marre, interview by Margaret Bessai, August 2022..
2. Kathryn Scudier, “Written on Stone: Rebecca La Marre in the Studio”, WSW Women’s Studio Workshop, June 9, 2017, https://wsworkshop.org/2017/06/rebecca-lamarre/.
3.  Scudier, “Written on Stone”. The book La Marre refers to is by Paulus Berensohn, Finding One’s Way With Clay: Creating Pinched Pottery and Working With Colored Clays, 1987.
4. Scudier, “Written on Stone”. Tablets are currently available online at Apophony Press: https://www.apophonypress.com/.
5. Rebecca La Marre, interview by Margaret Bessai, August 2022..
6. La Marre recommends the essay, “In the Praise of Shadows” that discusses Japanese philosophy in relation to embodied experiences in the home and in social spaces: Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, translation (2017) by Gregory Starr; photographs (2017) by Andrew Pothecary (Los Angeles, CA: Sopra Books, 2021).
7. Rob Froese interview with Margaret Bessai, July 2022.
8. Rebecca la Marre, “When the Pot Breaks, the Potter Laughs.” https://www.rebecca-lamarre.com/work.
9. Edwin A.M. Barber Atlee PHD, “Tulip Ware of the Pennsylvania- German Potters. An Historical Sketch of the Art of Slip-decoration in the United States”(1903) Pg 72 online at: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Tulip_ware_of_the_Pennsylvania-German_potters_-_an_historical_sketch_of_the_art_of_slip-decoration_in_the_United_States_%28IA_tulipwareofpenns00barbrich%29.pdf.
10. Rebecca La Marre, “When the Pot Breaks, the Potter Laughs.” https://www.rebecca-lamarre.com/work.
11. Manitoba Craft Council with the support of Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, “Reclaiming my Spirit through Clay: KC Adams,” YouTube, streamed live June 10, 2021, 52:31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9rueLa7H6I.
12. Manitoba Craft Council, “Reclaiming my Spirit through Clay: KC Adams”.
13. For comprehensive discussion on genetics and migration, see: Christine Merlin, Miriam Leidvogel, “The genetics and epigenetics of animal migration and orientation: birds, butterflies and beyond”, Journal of Experimental Biology, Volume 222, Issue Suppl_1, February 2019, https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/222/Suppl_1/jeb191890/2878/The-genetics-and-epigenetics-of-animal-migration.
14. Marjorie Dowhos, “Reclaiming their history: Three Manitoba women keeping their culture alive through language, art”, CBC News, September 30, 2021.
15. SHARDS: Contemporary artists in conversation with the ceramics of our forebearers, organized by the Manitoba Craft Council, Gallery 1C03, September – December 2017. https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/art-gallery/programming/2017-18/shards.html
16. Manitoba Craft Council, “Reclaiming my Spirit through Clay: KC Adams”.
17. Manitoba Craft Council, “Reclaiming my Spirit through Clay: KC Adams”.
18. Ozten Shebahkeget, “Artists draw on Indigenous teachings, land-based learning to create water vessels at Manitoba workshop,” CBC News, Manitoba, August 13, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/water-knowledge-workshop-1.6550595.
19. Dowhos,”Reclaiming their history”, CBC News, September 30, 2021.
20. Amy Snider, presentation for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), 2021, text shared by the artist.
21. Liam Harrap, “Alberta glacier suffered record melt this year — but researchers suggest it will get worse,” CBC News, Edmonton, October 17, 2021.
22. Curtis Mcmanus, Happyland: A History of the “Dirty Thirties” in Saskatchewan, 1914-1937, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011), 328.
23. Amy Snider, interview by Margaret Bessai, October 2022. Please also see the artist’s blog, “Precipice” 2020, https://amysnider.ca/2020/11/04/on-clay/.
24. Eco-anxiety is not a medical condition; it is defined by the American Psychological Association as “chronic fear of environmental doom”. Usage of the term became mainstream in 2019. Britt Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 20-24.
25. Amy Snider, Amber Phelps Bondaroff, “‘ENDINGS + BEGINNINGS’ Artist Conversation Series with Amy Snider. April 15, 2021”, Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre , April 16, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6-xqZhily4.
26. Amy Snider, “Place Settings: An Exegesis of Dust” paper for project, “The Things We Think With”, July 20, 2021, supplied by the artist.
27. Michel Dumont, “Clays” Canadian Minerals Yearbook, chapter 13.2, 2008, https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/mineralsmetals/pdf/mms-smm/busi-indu/cmy-amc/2008revu/pdf/cla-arg-eng.pdf.
28. Amy Snider, interview by Margaret Bessai, October 2022.
29. Britt Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 143.
30. Joyce Lovelace, “Craft: Seriously, What Does the Word Mean?”, American Craft Council, October 5, 2018, https://www.craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/craft-seriously-what-does-word-mean.

This article is published in issue 39.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue