The Extraction Paradigm

The brief was to find waste materials that could work to make ceramics more sustainable; from lowering firing temperatures to using recycled materials to make our clay or glaze. As a group we focused on taking waste materials like coffee grounds and eggshells and mixing it with clay to create a new material. I did many experiments with both terracotta and porcelain mixtures; the coffee grounds in the clay produced lighter and more porous clay, which could prove interesing in an insulation capacity, similar to fire bricks. The eggshells, when ground into a powder, proved to be a fully replaceable ingredient for whiting, or calcium carb, in both clay and glaze.