While we’ve been spending our time plastering walls these last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about why we like to play with mud. It certainly isn’t glamorous and it’s downright uncomfortable sometimes – our hands are chapped and dried out from the clay, we constantly plunge our hands into cold buckets of water or plaster, little pieces of straw get wedged under our fingernails, our backs ache, our muscles are sore, it’s dusty, etc., etc.
So, why go through all the trouble? For me, I get the sense I am creating something out of nothing. We are using dirt from the site, some sand, chopped up straw from a few bales, and water to create the exterior surface of the house. Imagine siding your house in $100 worth of raw materials. What a novelty to create your own building materials basically for free. I imagine that eating vegetables from your own garden has a similar amount of satisfaction. It’s like every time I smear a handful of plaster on the wall, it’s a little step closer to being self-sufficient. Like I’m a toddler again telling my parents “No! I want to do it myself!”
It’s also a very forgiving medium to work with. It’s easy to fix mistakes and it’s low tech. We really just eyeball the wall surface to make sure it’s plumb – this will leave some variations in the finish, but who cares? It’s supposed to look hand-made (not shitty hand-made like my junior high pottery class) but more artsy. There’s just so much texture in every handful of plaster – squishy, gritty, slippery, cool, moist, fibrous – unlike anything I’ve touched before and it just feels good in my hands.
Does that make any sense or do you still think we’re nuts?
--Jessie