Storytelling with Clay

The workshop “Storytelling with Clay” conducted with MA English students specializing in Digital Humanities explored the dynamic relationship between narrative and material practice. Moving beyond the boundaries of conventional storytelling through written or spoken language, the session invited participants to experience narrative as an embodied and tactile process. By engaging with clay, students encountered a medium deeply rooted in human history, ritual, and creativity, discovering how stories can emerge through touch, form, and transformation.

Facilitated by Dr. Sangeeta Jawla—whose interdisciplinary work brings together folklore, material culture, and Indian pottery traditions—the workshop foregrounded clay as a living archive of cultural memory. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork with potter communities across India, Dr. Jawla emphasized that clay is not only a material of craft but a vessel of meaning. In Indian cultural contexts, clay carries sacred associations: it is the substance of creation in many origin myths, the body of deities during festivals, and the foundation of everyday life through earthen vessels. Through these resonances, the act of shaping clay becomes a re-enactment of ancestral gestures, connecting the maker to the earth and to generations of storytellers who have used their hands as instruments of expression.

Participants were encouraged to mold clay based on personal memories, emotional landscapes, or abstract ideas. This act of making foregrounded the material’s dual nature—malleable yet perishable, grounding yet transformative. The process of shaping, breaking, and remaking their forms invited reflection on impermanence and continuity, echoing the cyclical nature of stories themselves. Clay thus became both a metaphor and a method: a medium through which narrative takes physical shape, and a metaphor for the creative process where imagination and matter converge.

The workshop also situated storytelling within the expanded framework of Digital Humanities. While digital media often privileges immateriality and preservation through data, the tactile immediacy of clay offered a counterpoint—reminding participants that storytelling has always been intertwined with the sensory and the material. The session prompted discussions on how narratives might be archived, represented, or reinterpreted across mediums—bridging the tangible and the digital, the ancient and the contemporary. Students reflected on how working with clay redefines authorship, as the material’s resistance and responsiveness co-create meaning alongside the maker.

Culturally, the workshop underscored how art forms rooted in traditional practices continue to inform modern expressions of creativity and thought. In India, where pottery is both a livelihood and a spiritual practice, engaging with clay connects one to indigenous knowledge systems that value sustainability, community, and ritual. The session thus served as a cultural intervention, reviving the embodied wisdom embedded in craft and aligning it with contemporary academic inquiry.

Ultimately, “Storytelling with Clay” functioned as a dialogue between the hand, the material, and the story. It demonstrated how interdisciplinary approaches—bridging folklore, literature, and digital studies—can expand our understanding of narrative as both a cultural and sensory act. Through this experience, students encountered clay not merely as matter but as metaphor, realizing that storytelling, much like clay, is shaped through touch, memory, and imagination.