I challenged AI to calculate the total mass of Weald Clay. Just for fun. ‘It could plausibly lie anywhere from tens of billions of tonnes to over a trillion tonnes’. That’s a lot of mud. Or, if you’re a potter, a lot of potential tableware.

Weald Clay is, however, notoriously rich and heavy, a stubborn, iron-laden sediment that has both shaped and resisted human intention for millennia. Iron was first extracted here in pre-Roman times; the forests fed the furnaces; the rivers powered the forges. You can still trace the industry in the landscape: Forge Lane, Cinder Hill, and Furnace Wood.

For potters though, the geology is more foe than friend. The clay lacks ‘plasticity’ and is obstinate, gritty and temperamental. More often destined for brick and tile than bowl or vase. And yet, there are makers who have learned to coax beauty from its resistance, digging the clay ‘wild’ from the ground beneath them. They mix it with other clays to make it submit to the wheel, grind stone into it for strength, or use it in slip glazes that celebrate its native textures and colour.

Maya Hughes is one of them. A Sussex native, she first dug her own clay in her garden, knee-deep in the river that winds through that land. It’s taken some time to learn the material, refining and blending it into tableware that feels unmistakably of the place it comes from. In Japan, there’s a word for this – sujiaji – the taste or character of a clay, its colour, texture, and kiln behaviour. Maya’s pieces speak the dialect of the Weald: rich, iron-dark glazes with deep blues and purples that blush to red-brown as the iron oxidises in air. Like the terroir of wine, the clay’s chemistry infuses her work with a sense of location. Hughes folds other local materials into her process: wood ash from fallen trees, powdered stone. In her hands, geology becomes biography.

Others, like Xanthe Maggs, have turned to the same clay for more political reasons. Her project, Made in Common Clay, mapped the rivers and strata of the Weald to explore ownership – who has the right to dig, to take, to profit from what lies beneath. It was a response to the Horse Hill fracking protests, where local groups challenged the legality of extraction rights. Maggs used the act of making itself, inviting people to shape and fire local clay, as a form of resistance. A tactile conversation with the land under dispute.

It’s a ridiculous pursuit, really – the idea of wild clay. In a world where you can order perfect porcelain with a click, these makers choose to dig in ditches, buckets in hand, like archaeologists of meaning. They sift, soak, and strain mud into art. The whole exercise is gloriously irrational, but that’s the point: wild clay is as much a philosophy as a material. It’s about grounding, literally and metaphorically, in the land beneath one’s feet.

Xanthe and Maya’s work can be seen on Instagram @xanthe_maggs and mayaimagine