This collection of ceramic vessels by designer John Henley materializes moments of human and land entanglement across Appalachia. Harvested from contaminated land across Pennsylvania and West Virginia, each clay body’s material composition has been polluted with heavy metals by human industry. Once processed, cast, and pit fired, these pollutants become embodied into artifacts that tell otherwise invisible narratives at the intersection of people, land, and the systems that drive power and progress. The Archive explores the impacts of this intersection in a region of our country that has been most found at the expense of these systems. It offers a uniquely objective, material approach to representing land histories and attempts to capture a moment of the unending emergence of human–nature interaction.
