Farmerama

SOIL: Common Ground is a three-part podcast series produced by Somerset House exploring what soil can teach us about being human, through the lens of art. Much of the history of human making springs from the soil. Cuneiform, the earliest form of writing, was engraved into clay; paint pigments come from minerals in the soil; and much of our material history is held in ceramics. But soil is not neutral; it is deeply entangled with politics of ownership embedded in the land. In this episode Shenece Oretha probes the ways the soil and clay are inspiring artists today, looking at the stories soil can tell about our past and our potential future. Ceramicist and writer Jennifer Lucy Allan reflects on the ways clay connects us to the earliest forms of making. Artists Annalee Davis and Lauren Gault look at the ways soil bears witness to our histories, from the trauma of the plantation to the deep time of paleontology. We create art from soil, but through our extraction and interaction, it is also changed. How can