This project is the culmination of two years of research stemming from the work of French pedagogue Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). His liberation of 10 non-verbal autistic children from a mental asylum in the 1960’s led to the creation of cartographic tracings, investigating the repetitious and self-regulative movements of the children in a camp where they became self-sufficient ‘outside of language’, in their network.

My interest in both clay and networks led me to explore my own teaching practice allowing for choice in a material study by inviting 3 networks (14 participants) to work remotely in their homes without speech or sight, working with a primitive material connecting by lighting campfires as I simultaneously fired their work.

During this pandemic crisis, I called out for handwritten letters describing isolation from networks. I took one letter and placed it inside a 1960 porcelain insulator and placed it within the firing. The remaining letters were displayed on a copper wire linking 14 porcelain pieces displayed in my domestic space while in isolation myself. A sound piece carried the voices and sounds of a crackling fire and an old telegraph machine speaking to the work as the letter fragments blew in the breeze.