Materiality
Margarites has made pottery for centuries, which makes it a natural home for a lab about matter as a record of time. Clay, stone and cave calcite are all archives. A Minoan sherd can date a palace floor, and a stalagmite layer can date a drought. Drawing on visits to Phaistos, Roman Gortyn and the Ideon Cave, participants work hands-on with local makers to ask what happens when climate data is held, fired, broken or reassembled rather than plotted. The lab explores how material processes such as sedimentation, crystallisation and firing can become shared languages between geochemists, archaeologists and artists. It also asks how tactile, crafted outputs might carry palaeoclimate knowledge to audiences who would never read a graph.
Lab Participants
Learn more about this labs participants by clicking on their image. Many of the researchers and partners work on several labs, and these connections are shown below.
Lab Journal and Updates
Throughout the lab, researchers, artists and partners reflect on their involvement in the project. View and follow lab updates here in the form of our shared lab journal.
Materiality: clay, stone and deep time in the potters' village of Margarites
10/10/26
Update
The EASE team
Author
The second EASE Artist Venturing Lab runs from 25 October to 1 November, following material through deep time: from cave scans and Bronze Age kilns to Minoan tombs, ancient trade and weaving.
Entanglements: a week in the caves, palaces and mountains of central Crete
10/10/26
Update
The EASE team
Author
On 18 October, artists, scientists and researchers gather in Zaros, below Mount Psiloritis, for the first EASE Artist Venturing Lab. Here is the week ahead, from live cave monitoring to the mountain cave of Zeus.
Lab journal content not yet available, but will be added after the lab start dates.