MUDDY DAYS
with CYRIL ZARCONE
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
Mud is a middle ground between earth and water.
Nobody knows if it will become liquid or solid.
It is a medium similar in a kitchen to kneading flour with salt water.
It is a child’s game, that has become adult, the modelling.
It is the trace of a colored clay on the rock walls.
It is the terrifying image of the torrents of mud.
It is the cooking in turning into brick.
It is the dilution in order to extract gold.
The mud composes the middle of the elements.
FULL GROUP PARTICIPATION
Pedagogical approach — fact sheet
Workshop title: Muddy Days
Author/coordinator: Cyril Zarcone
Duration/time span: 5 days
This workshop was part of the YES masterclass and focused on matter in its most unstable state: mud. At the intersection of earth and water, mud evokes both origin and dissolution, craft and catastrophe.Amid nearly continuous rain, Cyril Zarcone proposed to approach mud as a threshold material, oscillating between constructive potential and risk of collapse. Through basic gestures—kneading, mixing, shaping—the aim was to rediscover the primal malleability of a material that is both essential and overlooked.
Context and program
Materials and methodologies
The workshop used natural clay soil sourced near La Rabouilleuse. No industrial tools were used: only hands, containers, rainwater, and the ground itself.Forms produced were temporary, vulnerable, often left unfinished. At the end of the week, they were returned to the earth, a gesture of conscious dissolution, embracing impermanence as an aesthetic stance.
Can mud be considered a sculptural material? What roles do play, gesture, and instinct hold in form-making? What does an unstable material reveal about our own uncertainties? How do we think of an artwork that seeks not permanence but disappearance? The workshop emphasized direct, bodily engagement with matter, where slowness and unpredictability became agents of creation.
Key issues
Results and observations
Several collectively shaped forms emerged over the week—soft bricks, flattened loaves, hybrid organic shapes. Some bore handprints, others were hollowed out or collapsed on themselves. Humidity prevented firing, forcing the group to embrace fragility. Mud, as matter in becoming, opened a space for reflection on reversibility in art processes, and on conscious abandonment as an artistic gesture.
Benjamin, Walter. (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Ingold, Tim. (2012). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1962). La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zarcone, Cyril. (2020). Ordinary Ceramics. Unpublished personal project. [Contact artist for documentation.]
References
Information provided and reviewed by each workshop coordinator. Content may be revised or updated.