“Sixty degrees, 15 minutes north: 26 degrees, 35 minutes west, 1,866 meters deep. North Atlantic.” So read the brushstrokes on the underside of a bowl made by potter Joan Lederman. Lederman melts seafloor sediments into ceramic glazes on stoneware clay pots, and those coordinates locate the origin of the pattern-forming sediment on that p[articular piece. The results are extraordinary. Her work resembles the ocean itself, reflecting mood and light in subtle variations. Each glaze offers a quiet revelation, a whisper that beauty and order reside where least expected, even in dank, randomly collected mud.
A deckhand on the research vessel Oceanus brought Lederman her first bucket of the mud, leftovers from deep sea core samples collected by a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution WHOI). His curiosity, sparked by the malleability of the sediment, he sought the potter at her little seaside studio, tucked just beyond the Coast Guard Station on Woods Hole’s Juniper Point. “He thought it could be thrown into an interesting pot,” she explains. “My kiln was on and I stuck it into a spyhole. It melted.”
That was in 1996. What noone suspected was that the mud’s destiny lay as a glaze, not a pot, and while this was demonstrated by the first firing, it took Lederman years of experimentation to elicit the beauty she knew lay within the sediment. “The colors and patterns of some were so beautiful that when I first saw them, I cried and laughed at the same time,” she recalls. “And then I was kind of a mad woman. Begging, begging for more mud.”
These core samples of mud are stored in a few archives around the world, including one in Woods Hole. When folks at WHOI saw the results of Lederman’s labor, her acquisition of sediments got a lot easier. Her palette now includes mud from the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Dead Sea, Red Sea, Black Sea, as well as aquatic areas off Brazil, California, Africa, Antarctica, the Equator, and the mouth of the Amazon: 90 samples in all, in quantities varying from a tablespoon to a few gallons. Each produces a unique, river-like pattern. Lederman is able to manipulate the air supply in her kiln, reducing the fire in a way that effects the colors produced. One sediment, for example, evenly applied, can produce iridescent rivulets from deep orange to a delicate blue.
Sparkly single cell organisms, called foraminifera, create these patterns. They live for about two weeks before falling to the ocean floor, where they become part of the layers of sediment. These layers reflect millions of years, and give paleoclimate researchers a virtual timeline of the physical history of the earth at a given location. The presence of more or less of the tiny foraminifera determines the variation in glaze patterns produced by different core samples.
Lederman’s dream is to involve others in an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the sediments as glazes. There’s so much charisma, so much wonder in these materials, that others should have the opportunity,” she says. “How would a biologist or a chemist focus differently? They might not discover what I have, but they might discover other things.” As happens with any true alchemy, Lederman’s work evolves a sense of mystery and a bit of magic. “People ask me so many questions all the time. Why? Why? Why? I don’t know the answers.” She is okay with that. She doesn’t have to understand the beauty of t he universe. Her job is to render it visible.
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