Maja Quille

Parts of this project are currently on show at Pangolin Gallery London until June 2025.

This ongoing series of images are some of the early and unexpected ‘finished’ works to come out of my long-running London Clay project and creative residency at MOLA. They sprung out of a creative dialogue with ceramicist Orli Ivanov, looking at themes around the Anthropocene and what it means to be human at the changing of an epoch.

The work is inspired by the concept of technofossils, a term coined by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues at the University of Leicester, to describe the material footprints that humans will leave behind through their material goods. Globally, the majority of the objects that we create end up in a landfill. As a result of government legislation about how we should deal with our trash, landfills have become modern-day tombs that extend the time it takes for things to decay, which means that the vast majority of our stuff will be hardened in another geological layer before having the opportunity to decompose and disappear. What novel geologies will the future hold? As dinosaur bones fossilise over time, so too will lounge chairs, ballpoint pens, safety pins, compressed media drives, cars, and so many other objects become archaeological artefacts.

I am exploring ways of recreating the natural language of the earth through experimental ceramics, making hundreds of small ‘pinch pots’, one of the most fundamental ceramic shapes and an integral part of the ceramicist’s process. Each pot combines waste materials, such as dust from the underground and beer bottles found on the street, with different layers of London Geology. I then photograph the hidden universe of the work, invisible to the naked eye, through a magnification lens. In this process, familiar patterns emerge, resembling images from telescopes, weather patterns, brain scans, earth's landscape images from satellites. I am fascinated by this iconographic resonance across different areas of life; in cultures, in mathematics and in the natural world, which is repeated within the micro and macro.