A piece of earth for holding: Reflections on making with local clays
Benita Laylim
12 November 2025
Planned route, Edited Google maps screenshot, 2021
Benita Laylim documents her ceramic research by connecting four Sydney sites—Kurnell, East Hills, Redfern, and Malabar—to Indigenous philosophies of land-entanglement and colonial history.
(A message to the reader.)
These fragments are drawn from a paper written for my Honours research in 2021. They follow the chronology of a route I had intended to walk, connecting four sites where I gathered local clays. The arc traced around Botany Bay appealed to me because of the bay’s significance in Sydney’s short history. I planned the walk as a way of documenting and experiencing the landscape directly, but protracted Covid-19 l…
A piece of earth for holding: Reflections on making with local clays
Benita Laylim
12 November 2025
Planned route, Edited Google maps screenshot, 2021
Benita Laylim documents her ceramic research by connecting four Sydney sites—Kurnell, East Hills, Redfern, and Malabar—to Indigenous philosophies of land-entanglement and colonial history.
(A message to the reader.)
These fragments are drawn from a paper written for my Honours research in 2021. They follow the chronology of a route I had intended to walk, connecting four sites where I gathered local clays. The arc traced around Botany Bay appealed to me because of the bay’s significance in Sydney’s short history. I planned the walk as a way of documenting and experiencing the landscape directly, but protracted Covid-19 lockdowns curtailed this flânerie. Nonetheless, I kept the sequence.
Much of Western self-perception seems to rest on Descartes’ dictum, “I think therefore I am” (although, as Rosi Braidotti points out, “I shop therefore I am” may now be more apt). By contrast, Aboriginal thought centres not on the individual mind, but on location and relationship. Kumbamerri philosopher Mary Graham distils this into two principles: “The land is the law. You are not alone in the world.” In this sense, people are defined first by their connection to land and then by their relationships with others. This order establishes a custodial ethic: the environment is not a backdrop to human life, but something we are entangled with and responsible for. As Graham says, the way we treat the land becomes the blueprint for how we treat each other.
This project is an attempt to connect these ideas to a ceramic practice. Using found clay from four Sydney sites—Kurnell, East Hills, Redfern, and Malabar— I created works that integrate elements of place, considering the layered histories embedded in each location.
Four local clays: Kurnell, Pigface Point, Rachel Forster Hospital, Malabar Headland, 2021. Photo B. Laylim
KURNELL – Ghosts of lost species
Flying into Sydney, I often press my cheek to the glass and wonder at the strangeness of the Kurnell peninsula. From above, it looks otherworldly: the oil refinery, desalination plant, and suburban township are edged by bushland, before sandstone cliffs drop into the Pacific. Until beginning this project, I hadn’t realised that this peculiar landscape is also a centre point of our collective history. Kurnell is the site of first contact between Captain Cook—emissary of a vast colonial power—and the Gweagal people, the traditional custodians of this place.
Aerial View of Kurnell, Google Imagery, 2025.
When I visited on a hot, windy day, Kamay National Park was quiet. At the landing site, a 1870 sandstone obelisk dedicated to Cook faces The Eyes of the Land and the Sea (2020), a sculpture that alludes to both Cook’s ship and the bones of the Gweagal whale totem. Behind it, Botany Bay glittered with industry: cranes (not the bird variety), dredges, and stacked shipping containers. The scene seemed to exemplify Deborah Bird Rose’s observation that settler societies are founded on a dual war—against nature and against the Indigenous.
Kurnell is remembered as the “birthplace of modern Australia,” yet ecological losses from this “war against nature” are not marked here. Since colonisation, the country’s ecosystem has lost nearly half its forests, and at least 38 species of endemic flora are gone. These “ghost species” survive only in archives and data sets as spectral entries on a list.
The clay I collected was grey in its raw state, but when fired, it took on a soft, peachy tone. From it, I built a shrine on which I depicted four extinct plants: Musa fitzalani (Daintree river banana), Caladenia brachyscapa (short spider orchid), Solanum bauerianum (bridal flower), and Pultenaea maidenii (Maiden’s bush pea). In dialogue with the shrine, I shaped imagined forms of these ghost species—absent flora materialised through clay.
Benita Laylim, Ghost of extinct species (flauflau), 2021, clay, oxides stains (150x190x160mm). Photo – Campbell Henderson
PIGFACE POINT – Terabithia
Over the years, different friends have lived at Pigface Point, affectionately called Piggy’s or Pigs. Once run as a learning site for sustainability practices, it now serves chiefly as an off-grid residence. To get there, you cross a footbridge over the Georges, walk fifteen minutes along a bush trail, and unlock a barbaric-looking gate. Inside are modest dwellings embedded among rambling vegetation and curious structures. Owner Ted Trainer, a strong advocate of sustainability, global justice, and what he calls The Simpler Way, constructed much of the buildings and sculptures. A swamp reimagined as a Chinese garden with pagodas and bridges, giant cement crocodiles hidden under leaves, a bulldog-shaped pizza oven. Trails and gardens are dotted with didactic signage, urging alternatives to consumer capitalism. Yet what dominates the property is not ideology, but vegetation—plants edible and ornamental, native and introduced, grow everywhere and in all directions, teeming with insects, frogs, and birdsong.
Ninja in the paperbark forest at Pigface Point, 2019. Photo – Holly Matthews.
Indigenous thinker Tyson Yunkaporta writes that aligning oneself with the patterns and flows of land—“to be like your place”—brings balance and wholeness. Pigface has this effect: its rhythms are shaped by nature, drawing visitors into a simpler way of living. I called this section Terabithia, after the children’s book in which an imagined kingdom helps characters face difficulties in their lives. Ted’s utopia has a similar quality: imagination as both refuge and method, a way to envision better worlds while grounded in place.
On a warm morning, I followed a fire trail to the Pig’s clay pit. The clay was heavy with red iron and pale grey streaks. I collected it after rainfall, as high water content makes it easier to dig. I shaped it unprocessed, knitting together chunks as they came, following ridges and irregularities. To prevent cracks, I emulated cycles of wet and dry, reworking the surface as it hardened. Yet in the kiln, fissures reappeared due to the material’s nonuniform structure. From these fragments, I formed two “islands”—fragile imagined utopias of natural rhythm.
Benita Laylim, Island I & II, 2021, clay, oxides stains, (approx 180x180x15mm). Photo – Campbell Henderson
RACHEL FORSTER HOSPITAL – * Line & dot*
One afternoon in 2019, I was running late for an appointment when I noticed the gates to a construction site on Pitt Street, Redfern, standing open. The building on the block’s eastern edge had been gutted, and afternoon sun spilled through its skeleton. It was dilapidated, disused, and beautiful. Though compelled to linger, I hurried on, resolving to return.
By the time I did, heavy rain had set in. Without sunlight, the site now seemed dull, but as I stepped inside, my boots stuck to the ground. Clay! I gathered chunks and carried them to my car, getting soaked in the process.
This was the former site of Rachel Forster Hospital, the first in colonised Australia run by women for women. Established in 1937 by pioneering female doctors, it served the diverse communities of Redfern until 2000. A heritage report described the hospital’s original design as emphasising “extensive open garden space… for psychological reasons.” That vision contrasts sharply with the new development, where open land has given way to apartments—space once for community redirected toward profit.
Old facade of RFH in new development, 2021. Photo – B. Laylim
Visiting again, I spoke with construction workers about my project. They were friendly, even overbearing. As I left, one older man told me, “I like you. You’re so skinny, you need to eat more. Fat people are happy. And just remember, when you have babies, you can’t send them back.” I wasn’t offended so much as struck by the blunt patriarchy in his words: objectification, unsolicited instruction, and the reduction of my role to motherhood. This is on a site enriched by progressive women nearly a century earlier, now demolished in the name of progress and efficiency.
The following artwork draws on Elizabeth Farrelly’s line (masculine) and dot (feminine) concept to examine urban space. Masculine qualities—efficiency, order, and function—interact with feminine qualities—being, interrelation, and the space between—to highlight how balanced design can preserve human experience amid development and dense city planning.
Benita Laylim, Line and dot, 2021, clay, oxides, stains, (280x280x20mm). Photo – Campbell Henderson
MALABAR – Makarrata
I first heard the site called Magic Beach in 2013, when a friend described a glorious day there. Enthusiasm is contagious; discovery creates a warm neural path of memory. I initially used the names Magic Beach and Poo Beach, referencing the nearby wastewater facility, before settling on Malabar, the headland and suburb’s proper name. It is indeed magical. Sandstone rises and plunges, its warm gradients shifting with sunlight. I recall a summer day, hungover, with friends and motorbikes, crossing the city to reach a shade cave, bouncing along rocky nodes, and plunging into the water—a rare, indescribable freedom. As Nina Simone says, “freedom is a feeling. Like a new way of seeing something.”
Clay streaks through water – Malabar, 2020. Photo – Benita Laylim.
The headland attracts walkers, birdwatchers, divers, and picnickers, hosting remnant coastal bushland and native animals. World War II gun batteries and tunnels now shelter endangered Common Bent-winged Bats. The southern headland, Boora Point, holds Aboriginal heritage, with middens, grinding grooves, and engravings. Farrar describes such places as* ‘porous’*, allowing one to feel the depth of time, where “ghosts… remind visitors both of our impermanence and the relentless rhythms of nature in its reclamations of the manmade.”
Elizabeth Grosz notes that “because the earth frames and engulfs the body, the body can sing the earth and the stories of its origin.” In researching the histories of these clay sites, I encountered violent and oppressive pasts. Yet, Indigenous thinkers like Yunkaporta and Graham offer ways to reconcile these wounds through a considered, ongoing connection to Country.
I gather clay beneath a rock near my favourite swim spot; pale grey, firing to off-white. I make a work from the clay, replicating the sense of freedom experienced at Malabar, reflecting the interrelations between past and place. Moving my hand through water, casting shadows on coral, weeds, and rock, each fingertip creates ripples. I am reminded that life—and memory—is in motion, constantly becoming.
Laylim, Sunroom in your memory palace, 2021, clay, oxides, stains, fishing line (280x210x15mm). Photo C. Henderson
Laylim, Sunroom in your memory palace, 2021, clay, oxides, stains, fishing line (280x210x15mm). Photo C. Henderson
Car boot full of clay, 2019. Photo – B.laylim
References
Alex Miller, “Creative Geographies of Ceramic Artists: Knowledges and Experiences of Landscape, Practices of Art and Skill.” Social & cultural geography 18.2 (2017): 245–267. Web. 247.
Margaret E. Farrar “Amnesia, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place Memory,” 2021, 14.
Mary Graham, “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 3 (January 1, 1999): 105–18.
Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK ; Polity Press, 2006). 3.
Tyson Yunkaporta. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Text Publishing Company, 2019.
About Benita
Benita is a multidisciplinary artist from Dharug country in the Blue Mountains, now based on Gadigal land in Sydney. She works primarily in ceramics with a practice grounded in slow, intentional making and ecocentric principles. Drawing from research in history, ecology and culture she experiments with clay as a means of storytelling.