Reclaim / Remake - waste in our process

There is an understood process of reclaiming clay in ceramic production. Until it has been fired to temperatures that cause the molecular process of quartz inversion (573˚C), a single clay body can be endlessly reclaimed into a workable clay material.

Anchor has an established working process around reclaiming clay offcuts from our production process so that they can be remixed with wet clay to create a fresh batch clay for use. This process allows us to minimise our waste and maximise efficiency in our making.

Although relatively inexpensive as a material, clay is a non-renewable resource mined from the earth’s crust. Clay minerals are formed by the process of stone being weathered by water and wind, a process that can take up to 10,000 years to generate the kind of materials we use. We believe that as soon as we become aware of this limitation on our resources, we are obligated to ensure we aren’t careless with it as a material.

Increasingly, many materials are shipped into Australia from all over the world, expanding the environmental footprint of our studio and making it even more critical that we are stringent with our reclaim management. By working closely with our friends at Walker Ceramics, we know the clays we use can contain as much as 60 percent locally Victorian mined materials - such as Kaolin from Pittong, Ball Clay from Axedale, and Silica from Lang Lang.

There are moments when a clay has been contaminated by another clay or working process - such as when we change from one clay body to another in our equipment - that it becomes unusable for production. This creates what is essentially a waste by-product for the studio.

The word waste however implies an end of usefulness or a loss in value, and while this material is no longer something we can use in our standard process it is still an interesting textural documentation of what is being worked on in the studio at a given time. And it’s from this creative lens that our team began the exploration of mixing these off cuts and contaminated clay into an ever changing clay body, which we call the Studio Process Clay Body.

The Studio Process Clay Body is formulated from what would otherwise need to be discarded and is an iron-rich, grogged clay body that fires to 1300˚C. It can be used as a clay to extrude objects or roll slabs, but can also be repurposed to be used as a slip to join pieces of clay or stained with oxides and used to create various surface finishes.