Diyas : Thinking through making

Jayne Wallace & Sean Kingsley

We’re both makers - we make for pleasure, we make to sell, we make within research projects to find things out about people and contexts and sometimes we make to make sense of things for ourselves. Our diya objects were made by us as a way to think about the different experiences we have had over the last fortnight in Ahmedabad. A lot of what we have done over these two weeks has centred on meeting craft makers and finding ways to have conversations with them - sometimes through making together, sometimes through showing images of things that we have made before. Photographs, drawing and prototyping has been our shared visual language and way to communicate. Making the transformed diya objects has been another form of conversation for us. We made the objects as a way of reflecting on the different potters, pieces of pottery and cultures that they belong to and how we could bring parts of ourselves and our own cultures into this dialogue. We also hope to be able to share the results of what we have made with the potters in the village, to continue our dialogue with them.

During our first visit to Sarkhej (a pottery village on the south west outskirts of Ahmedabad) we met a group of women who were making diyas (small traditional clay earthenware oil lamps, lit during celebrations and festivals). They were doing this by putting shredded, slightly dry clay into a metal mould on the large metal press they were seated at. A spin of the large press’ wheel squeezed excess clay from the mould and produced an intricate, shiny clay diya. Ornate, but simple forms, the rows of diyas drying in the sun looked beautiful and also rich examples of a particular Indian craft aesthetic. Once back at NID as we talked through the things that we’d seen we kept returning to the diyas. On looking into their cultural significance, we also found messages online from prime minister Modi from 2015 asking that people stop buying imported modern battery operated diyas and to keep India’s ceramics craft industry alive.

We knew that we wanted to ‘make with’ the diyas and returned to Sarkhej to see if we could bring some unfired ones back with the intention of transforming them in some yet to be discovered way. We also brought back some clay from the village both to see how it handled and in order to improve our chances of being able to join the diyas to pieces we might make.

In the ceramic studio we found a change of pace to the Caravan and some thinking time. We initially spent time throwing simple forms on the wheel and playing with how the diyas may look if incorporated into them. One of us is a potter and the other has taken up pottery over the last 2 years. Our personal aesthetics in the things we make are typically very simple and we made simple contemporary forms here both for this reason and also so as not to compete with the ornamentation of the diyas. The forms of diyas have some natural characteristics such as spouts and bowl forms that lend themselves to being spouts of jugs or lids and we carefully cut and removed sections and offered them up to the cylinder shape we were throwing. While some of the making decisions were set by the technical difficulties of getting our wet thrown forms and the over-dry diyas to the same dryness, so that they could be successfully joined, we didn’t want to overwork the forms - on seeing the simple ways in which the pottery in Sarkhej was produced we wanted to reflect that in the decisions that we were making. Over the course of six and a half hours we built seven pieces.

The process of making these pieces gave us both the time to talk together about our visits to the village and the lives and craft cultures of the people there. Making can be a way of absorbing experiences, in the same way drawing enriches the viewer in ways that taking a photograph rarely does. We have made objects that suggest ways in which diyas could be incorporated into a wider western aesthetic. It was a way for us to think through how these traditional objects from one place could take on a series of new roles back in our lives. We have made pieces that we would like to live with and use and in that way they have meanings to us beyond referencing this visit and our respect for the cultural ways that diyas are used in India. By making domestic objects that we would both use in our homes we’ve folded the dias into what our everyday lives are like.

The conversations have already opened up further on completion of the transformed diyas, with response from Anand Bhai the workshop coordinator in ceramics at NID and Neelima Hasija, the Course Coordinator of Ceramics at NID.

Anand has a unique view of Sarkhej as he comes from there and knows all the families and people we have met. He is a traditional potter and understands the history, successes and challenges that the pottery community faces. The stamped diyas and jigger/jollied plant pots are fairly recent developments in a move toward mechanisation. While economically making sense, he also sees this as trend towards de-skilling. He thinks that the potters who make the round bottomed pots for water have 15-20 years left before they will die out. These pots are extremely challenging to make, requiring precise timing to paddle out pots at 2 stages of them drying out. Running a pottery like this, he says, requires 5 or 6 people; it just isn’t possible to run it with fewer, but fewer people are interested in doing it.

On seeing our transformed diyas, Anand felt that giving our ideas back to the community could help them to see some alternative possibilities for their production. To help them iterate and innovate. Here we have the potential for continuing connections through ‘making conversations’.

Neelima works with rural potters and considers Sarkhej an urban pottery village, with the capacity to adopt more industrial processes. Where we were seeing Sarkhej itself as a rural village environment Neelima saw them as producers of goods for the neighbouring urban life of Ahmedabad. Whilst we saw the modes of production as very simple (electric wheel, hand turned mould press and electric jigger/jolly) Neelima knew them to be sophisticated and a departure from the traditional pottery that still exists in rural India. Our transformed diyas sparked this conversation.

Some of the NID ceramics students have been surprised by the power of transforming a familiar object and using it in a western way. What was interesting for us was that we hadn’t seen our forms as particularly western, but of course they are! The east meets west in a pottery form?

A final comment to make is that all of these conversations with Anand, Neelima and students in the department were only made possible by the fact that we were making and then had made these pieces. Just as in Sarkhej the showing of pottery that we had made opened up conversations about the wider contexts and implications for the communities of makers who produce them - in this case both the diya makers in Sarkhej and us.

We have made objects that suggest ways in which diyas could be incorporated into a wider western aesthetic. It was a way for us to think through how these traditional objects from one place could take on a series of new roles back in our lives. We have made pieces that we would like to live with and use and in that way they have meanings to us beyond referencing this visit and our respect for the cultural ways that diyas are used in India. By making domestic objects that we would both use in our homes we’ve folded the diyas into what our everyday lives are like.