8” x 10” Endangered Materials | Watercolor Poster
This poster features 9 of the nearly 200 watercolor paintings of ceramic materials that are either endangered or no longer available to the ceramic community due to resource loss, the closing of mines, or the reallocation of supplies. Pewabic Education Director Annie Dennis has been using her skills in watercolor to document these losses in beautiful art.
ENDANGERED MATERIALS PROJECT
Every part of Pewabic - every tile, every pot, every program - depends on materials. Metal oxides and carbonates like iron, cobalt, and copper create our colorful surfaces; natural clays like ball clay and kaolin form the foundation of our clay bodies; feldspars and minerals help glazes melt and develop their final visual character; and countless other materials shape how ceramic work looks, feels, and functions.
So what happens when (sometimes overnight) those materials are no longer available to us? How do we keep up with production, orders, and public programs? How do we maintain consistency across our work? How do we carry forward a legacy when the tools that built it begin to shift?
These are questions that we’ve been actively navigating over the past several years, as material shortages have disrupted not only Pewabic, but much of the ceramics industry - especially studios like ours that continue to mix our own clay bodies and glazes from raw materials.
Today, the Endangered Materials Project includes nearly 200 paintings of materials, with many more still to come. We don’t know what the final form of this project will be, or if it will ever even have one. Materials disappear, reappear, shift, and evolve, and what feels stable is often temporary.
- Print measures 8” x 10”
- Also in the Endangered Materials print collection: 18” x 24” Endangered Materials, Pacer Feldspar, Edgar Minerals EPK, Cedar Heights Airfloated Clay, and Cedar Heights Redart