Wild Clay is a participatory research project run by artists Kwame Lowe and Nyima Murry.

Wild Clay works with marginalised communities to collaboratively explore people’s relationships with landscape, using clay as a tool to think through deep ‘clay time’ and foreground wider material, spatial, social and political concerns.

Rooting ourselves in the local landscape of Epping Forest, Wild Clay has been engaging with the current bylaws of this ancient landscape. Historically, the forest was engaged as a ‘productive landscape’, with commoners able to use the forest to remove wood, foodstuff, and graze cattle - a right known as ‘Lopping.’ Today, the public’s engagement primarily consists of moving through the landscape rather than working with, or responding to it - the heritage of lopping or foraging lesser known and practised.

The process of lopping for wild clay can provide clay as a material for making ceramics while allowing us to shift the focus from thinking about landscape as something to be simply mapped, surveyed and moved through, to the possibilities of creating alternative, tangible and meaningful relationships with land.