Clare Carter

Through the lens of motherhood, the video Our Wider Flesh articulates ideas about bodies and land, maternal ancestry and the enclosure acts preceding the Industrial Revolution which enabled capitalism in Europe to spread across the world. Set around a building site in a field across from my terraced house in the semi-rural, post-industrial village of Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, an a capella composition emerges from responding to the sounds of machinery as the landscape is carved up and turned into future homes. Footage of moving through this landscape is thrown onto paper using a faulty projector that is in the process of breaking down, metamorphosing and composting the imagery as it moves across the surface. My seven year old daughter is projected dancing around the arches of the Victorian viaduct next to their home, weaving her body into the spaces, mirroring and reifying the sensory exchange that might have existed before people were separated from their land by the centuries of capitalism. This separation can be witnessed and experienced as the dualisms of nature and culture manifest within the landscape and ecological crisis that is unfolding throughout the current epoch of time known as the Anthropocene.

Estacion de Guaguas (bustop), 11 clay sculptures, 2024

The sculptures were presented on plinths each at different heights and arranged in a snake-like sequence cutting diagonally cross the gallery space. They all incorporate materials foraged from different landscapes around Yorkshire where I take my children, including the National Coal Mining Museum, the beaches at Flamborough Head, and the fields around our home in Denby Dale. Coal, mine ochre, glacial deposits from the last ice-age discovered in landslides on the coast, and clay from fields used for farming were applied as slips and glazes for the sculptures.

The use of the word ‘Guagua’ to describe these sculptures is explained in an artist book created to accompany the vessels, highlighting how it is as a response to the convergence of storytelling, carrying babies inside and outside of the body, migration to and from the island of Lanzarote, and the methodologies involved in tending to clay (the flesh of the landscape) creating vessels that reflect the chaos of caregiving, attachment, and separation to both bodies and land, and the forms that emerge from this convergence of methodologies. 

Guagua (wa-wa)

The word guagua is known to be used exclusively in The Canary Islands, situated off the northwest coast of Africa, and Cuba in the Caribbean. It means ‘bus’ and officially replaces the latin-derived autobus used in mainland Spain and other countries in the Spanish-speaking world. Since the Spanish colonisation of The Canary Islands from the 15th Century, these islands played a significant role in the Atlantic slave trade route, facilitating the colonisation of Africa, the Americas and beyond, throughout the centuries of expanding capitalism towards globalisation. During this time, there have been considerable migrations of Canarians to the Americas, usually due to drought, famine and volcanic eruptions, and migrations have been reciprocal from the Americas back across the Atlantic. This is believed to be the reason why Cuba and The Canary Islands use guagua, however, its etymology is still disputed. Here are some possible explanations:

Wagon (n) from Dutch wagen; cognate with Old English wægn ‘farm wagon’, meaning a vehicle in English; from Latin vehiculum, from veh(ere) ‘to carry, convey, ride’.

Awawa (v) ‘to move quickly’ in Ngu language, spoken by African slaves in Cuba.

Guagua (n) ‘baby’ or ‘little child’ in Quechuan language, spoken in South America.

Guagua (adv) for ‘little, for nothing, for free’, spoken in Cuba (children are not charged for riding buses).

Wa & Wa Co. Inc (Washington & Walton Company Incorporated), an American transport company which manufactured some of the first passenger carriers towards the mid-late 19th century in Cuba.

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I have called these ceramic vessels Guaguas because I became a mother on the island of Lanzarote and began to carry something inside my body for the first time whilst living within a very different landscape to my homeland of West Yorkshire. This journey - of becoming a migrating vessel - was the start of a continuous state of transformation, a slow unraveling and merging with an(other) which brought me to thinking very differently about landscape and caregiving. As I handle the clay like the flesh of the land, I am replicating or mirroring the process of attending to a baby or young child, experiencing the intimacy of touch and the continuous, cyclical nature of caregiving. Like pulsating, widening circles, as my children grow older we are slowly and gradually moving further away from each other, sometimes returning to intimacy, before orbiting out again into the world beyond the flesh. I see the clay as the space between our bodies, and how this intimacy can sometimes be pushed to its limits and collapse in destructive ways, before another space is created to catch the chaos or whatever the other might need next. Sometimes these spaces in the vessels can also speak about what isn’t there, what was lost, or what failed.

If I create an aggregate by collapsing all the possible meanings of the word guagua, I find a deeper layer hidden beneath my maternal relationship with the landscape of Lanzarote which I sense is made manifest in these clay vessels … the vehicle taking its traveller to who knows where … the wa-wa-wah feeling of moving my body across a landscape, as if by magic … the little baby carefully carried in my arms for nothing … because to care-give is to expect nothing of the other … the corporate branding of a mode of transportation navigating a capitalist world built upon the exploitation of bodies and land as resources.

Suborbital (one moon, two shores), projection on board with plastic disc, 2024, is an installation using a shape taken from a map of where I walk each morning through the landscape around my home, which has a projection of two shorelines (one in Yorkshire, one in Lanzarote) and a hanging, rotating disc almost touching its surface. The disc randomly interrupts and captures an image of my children in the ocean, moving more frequently when a person moves within its vicinity.

Ambient Stones (sea egg), video projection on fired clay, volcanic sand, 2024 is an installation which incorporates a stage-like set featuring various fired clay sculptures painted with mine ochre that capture the projection and create a miniature landscape within the boundaries of the table. The video is of my daughter creating a nest on the shoreline and playing with a stone that she imagined was alive.

Shadows, fired clay, 2024.

Discrete pieces of fired clay incorporating found materials within different landscapes I frequent around Yorkshire (coastal, mine, fields) bearing forms that I sensed were operating like shadows of the vessels I was creating for the Guagua series.

Shields, Doorways, Apertures, 16 digital prints on recycled paper, 2024.

The arch is a reoccurring shape I encounter daily with my children as we move through the landscape of our homeland. In many ways it is one of the very few enduring forms that continue to exist as the environment and architecture changes to accommodate our ways of dwelling, serving as a a symbol of defence, doorway or aperture that bears witness to the decline of spirituality and/or perhaps a certain disenchantment with the landscape.