Reading a brick

A brick is local and universal at the same time. How do we read an actual brick if we see it as a document? The format, color, roughness, marks from tools or fingers can say something about time, firing, place, technique and a body.

For almost two years, I have visited Sendstad farm on Nes in Innlandet, Norway, a former production site for bricks, where I have worked with questions about clay, place, body and technology. 

I thank Ola Sendstad, Lone Sjøli, Morten Sendstad and Marit Sendstad for local knowledge, food, hospitality, and good conversations.

I work directly with clay in the agricultural landscape. It contains roots, stones and small insects and can be dry or sticky depending on the season and the weather. Turning the landscape into bricks is something you can't read about in a book only. The soil is mixed with water, sieved, dried and kneaded. You have to find a consistency where the clay can easily be pressed down into a brick form and at the same time hold the form when the form is pulled up. The bricks are turned and dried over the summer and fired in the autumn in an improvised reduction kiln made from a cut-off oil barrel inside a burning fire.

My small production begins to talk with the original bricks from the Sendstad production, made between 1862 and 1927. One brick in particular call out loudly from the past with a handprint from one of the old workers.[1] Perhaps the brick was a bit stuck in the mold and had to be pushed out with one hand? I bring the old brick, clay from Sendstad, 3D scans, photographs and video material back to my studio in Oslo. There, the material is processed further, and I use the clay 3D printer as a medium to get closer to the worker from the old production and the current but always changing landscape at Sendstad.

I'm back at Sendstad farm digging for more clay. I try not to take too much at a time, because the clay here feels more precious. It is mixed with soil, roots, sand and stones and it smells furtile. It is part of the agricultural landscape, and very different from the clay I can get in tons from construction sites in the center of Oslo, or at the landfill for unwanted masses.

The soil absorbs everything like a porous sponge and becomes dry and crumbly when it has been dry weather for a long time. Today, it sticks together in smaller clumps and crumbles easily between my fingers.

I have a Rema 1000 plastic bag with me and leave it open while I dig here and there for clay soil to fill it with. I squeeze the clay in my hand to check the quality along the way and add a little water from the small creek and roll a coil between my hands.

I take a picture of the plastic bag filled with clay in the landscape. First with the mobile phone, then with the proper camera. There is something about this that can tell a story. I 3D scan the subject with my iPad and the Polycam app. The app takes 250 photos while I walk around the bag from about one meters distance and try to capture all angles. The app calculates the distance and creates a 3D surface based on the images. The clay, the landscape and the plastic bag are flattened into a digital carpet without thickness.

I carry the filled plastic bag like a pregnant belly back to the rental car, afraid that the plastic handles will break. I bring the clay back to my studio in Oslo. There I add water and strain the clay through an 80-mesh sieve and dry the mass to a peanut butter consistency. The refined clay is stuffed into tubes that are squeezed out through a 3D printer made for clay. The landscape and the plastic bag of clay come out in layers. I fire it high and the landscape becomes hard and almost metallic on the surface.

A little too hard. A bit too static. Too finished. I place the mud, sand, stones and roots that was filtered out in the refining process of the clay in a 3D printed container with a plastic bag over it. The landscape is slowly starting to sprout again.

I continue to work with a combination of the scanned plastic bag in the landscape and the container with the growing biproduct during the work-in-progress exhibition I do for my midterm seminar at the ROM for Art and Architecture in Oslo.[2] I enlarge the plastic bag file 1:1. Furthermore, I divide it into smaller pieces so it is not too large for the limitations of the 3D printer. I have with me the sifted out biproduct from the processing of the 3D printable clay. In the beginning, when I worked with blue clay, I threw all this sifted out material in the trash, dumped it somewhere out in a ditch or took it back to where I had dug the clay. After a while I started saving it without knowing how to use it. I think of it as a waste product in my human scale extraction which also refers to the biproduct of mining, such as illite, garnet, slag and fly ash. I am trying to 3D print with the Sendstad slag, which is sieved with a kitchen strainer, but even that is too coarse for the rigid screw system inside the 3D printer brain. It sounds strange and gets stuck. I build the bottom of the shape by hand with the sifted out material and put it together with the 3D printed landscape while I think about how I can adapt the machine to the rough, uneven and unpredictable.

[2] https://r-o-m.no/01-12-Midtveisseminar-med-Sigrid-Espelien