Eggshell

In Any Way Shape or Form

In Any Way Shape or Form, food waste and creative practice were explored during a twelve-week artist residency in Melbourne, Australia.

The title of the project is a playful reference to the freedom of using a wide variety of hand building and wheel-throwing techniques to create the work. In contrast with the process, the artist chose to work within material and size constraints to keep the form in focus.

A key material and symbol in the work is the egg. Each plate is glazed with a recipe Claire Ellis developed during the residency, using eggshells as a raw material in place of the mined material called whiting. A healthy hen lays on average one egg a day, the same making schedule was adopted for the plates. The project is an exercise in productive creativity and the egg represents new life and creation. Eggshells are also food waste, a concern in Ellis’ work and an issue intertwined with the use of plates. Twenty-five dollars from the sale of each plate was donated to Ozharvest, Australia’s leading food rescue organisation fighting food waste and working towards food security and sustainability. The donation from each plate allowed Ozharvest to deliver fifty meals.

Making process

The clay is wheel-thrown and/or hand built and dried. The eggshells are dried, fired to 1000 Celsius, ground in a pestle and mortar and passed through a fine sieve before mixing with the remaining glaze materials. The eggshell glaze is brushed on the raw plates before firing to 1270 Celsius.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.