Soil and the Ghost
Unfired clay, natural soil, local materials
200cm* 150cm
Yale Norfolk School of Art, CT
2025
Jeanette Lin, Yuhan Zhao
What remains, when labor, memory, and industry fade?
Soil and the Ghost is a site-specific community artwork that draws from Norfolk’s layered industrial history and personal memories of childhood play. Using natural soil and locally sourced clay, rather than pre-fabricated materials, the project reimagines utilitarian wooden forms once central to Norfolk’s manufacturing legacy: bowls, cheese boxes, scythes, planters’ hoes. These everyday objects, born from the land and shaped by human labor, are sculpted anew by hand in clay, honoring the intimacy of craft and the materiality of place. Equally central are recollections of molding earth into pots and pretend dumplings during outdoor childhood games in China. These fragile, playful creations disappeared with the rain, quietly returning to the soil. This tender ritual of making and unmaking echoes Norfolk’s own histories of production and community.
The installation spans approximately 1.5 by 2 meters. All clay pieces remain unfired, intentionally impermanent. As they slowly weather and dissolve into the ground, the process will be carefully documented. In this way, Soil and the Ghost becomes both an act of remembrance and a quiet gesture of release. Like the soil itself, these histories are not static. They live, erode, and return.
Eroding
