Making Totems: The Art of Combining Old Farm Implement Parts and Clay

The Roots of Totem-Making in American Folk Art

Totem-making has deep roots in human culture across nearly every civilization on earth, from the carved cedar poles of the Pacific Northwest to the painted ancestor figures of West Africa. In the American context, totems have taken on a unique character shaped by the landscape, the labor, and the materials at hand. Artists working in rural traditions have long understood that meaning can be embedded in objects, that a carefully assembled collection of forms can tell a story about identity, place, and the passage of time. Marian Williams, a studio potter working within this tradition, has developed a body of work that speaks directly to this inheritance while pushing it in a distinctly personal direction.

The American Midwest and South in particular carry a visual vocabulary shaped by agricultural work. Generations of farming families left behind not only memories but objects — rusted plowshares, broken cultivator teeth, worn gear wheels, and bent harrow tines. These discarded implements, once essential to survival, now accumulate in barn corners and roadside scrap piles. For most people, they represent obsolescence. For an artist like Marian Williams, they represent raw material — not just physically, but symbolically. Each piece of worn iron carries the weight of anonymous human effort, and that weight is exactly what totem art seeks to embody.

Williams approaches her totem work with a deep respect for both the ceramic tradition she was trained in and the found-object sensibility she has cultivated over decades. Her process is not about imposing a predetermined design onto materials, but about entering into a conversation with them. She walks fields and visits farm auctions, handling old implements with the same attentiveness a sculptor brings to a block of marble. The question she asks is not “what can I do with this?” but rather “what does this want to become?” That distinction, subtle as it sounds, produces work of a fundamentally different character than assemblage art driven purely by aesthetic calculation.

Understanding the Materials: Farm Implements as Artistic Medium

Old farm implements are among the most evocative of all discarded objects precisely because they were designed to perform hard, specific work in direct contact with the earth. A cultivator shovel, for instance, is shaped by engineering necessity into a form that is simultaneously aggressive and elegant — a curved blade tapering to a point, worn smooth along its working edge by thousands of passes through soil. When removed from its functional context and placed in the studio, that form doesn’t lose its history; instead, the history becomes the subject. The patina of rust, the dents and bends from years of use, the faint impressions left by the earth itself — all of these become visual information that an artist can work with and around.

Williams has developed a keen eye for what she calls “the right kind of worn.” Not every piece of old iron serves her purposes. She is looking for objects that have achieved what might be described as a state of dignified deterioration — things that are clearly aged but not destroyed, that show the evidence of use without losing their essential form. A wheel hub that has rusted into a uniform orange fuzz has lost its definition. A cast iron seat bracket with surface rust that reveals rather than conceals the underlying texture is exactly what she wants. This discrimination is part of what separates her work from simple assemblage; she is curating a visual language as much as gathering raw materials.

The clay component of her totems plays an equally important role, and the relationship between the two materials is carefully considered. Williams works primarily with stoneware clays that she sometimes mixes with grog — coarse particles of pre-fired clay — to achieve a texture that echoes the roughness of aged iron without mimicking it. The clay elements she creates for her totems are often slab-built or coil-built rather than thrown, because she wants surfaces that carry the marks of hand-building rather than the smooth symmetry of the wheel. These organic, slightly irregular forms read as companions to the worn implement parts rather than contrasts, creating a visual harmony across what might otherwise seem like incompatible materials.

[STUDIO_IMAGE: a rustic pottery studio with iron farm implements and raw clay pieces arranged on a wooden worktable, warm afternoon light]

The Construction Process: Bringing Clay and Iron Together

Building a totem is a fundamentally different challenge than making a pot or a sculpture intended to be viewed from a single angle. Totems are vertical structures that typically present multiple faces, and they accumulate meaning as the eye travels upward through their stacked elements. Williams begins each totem with what she calls a “ground element” — usually a heavy iron piece that anchors the composition both physically and conceptually. This might be the cast wheel of an old seed planter, a worn plow disk, or the foot assembly of a cultivator. Whatever it is, it needs to be stable, visually weighty, and capable of bearing the load of what comes above it.

From that base, Williams alternates between iron and clay as she builds upward, and the sequencing of those alternations is one of the most demanding aspects of her creative process. She must think simultaneously about structural integrity — how the elements are physically joined and supported — and about visual rhythm, the way the eye will move through the finished piece. Clay elements are sometimes fired separately and then attached to the iron armature, while in other cases Williams builds clay directly around iron parts, allowing the metal to become embedded in the ceramic body. The latter approach requires careful management of the firing process, as the different rates of thermal expansion between iron and clay can cause cracking if not accounted for.

Joining the materials is a technical challenge that Williams has addressed through years of experimentation. She uses a combination of methods depending on the specific requirements of each totem. Some connections are made with high-temperature ceramic adhesives applied after firing. Others involve mechanical fastening, where clay elements are shaped to grip iron components the way a hand grips a handle. In particularly complex structures, she builds internal armatures from iron rod that pass through ceramic elements, providing spine-like support for the whole composition. The goal in all cases is a join that is invisible in the finished work — she wants viewers to perceive the totem as a unified object, not as an assemblage of parts held together by obvious means.

Surface Treatment and Firing: Where the Work Comes Alive

The surface of a Marian Williams totem is where her visual sensibility is most fully expressed. She approaches the clay surfaces in her totems with a layered approach to color and texture that draws on both traditional ceramic technique and her study of how iron ages in the natural world. Her glazes are typically earthy — ochres, dark browns, muted greens, deep reds — chosen not for decorative appeal but for their ability to read as natural rather than applied. She often uses multiple glaze layers, applying them in a way that allows lower layers to show through breaks and variations in the upper layer, mimicking the way rust and mineral deposits build up on iron surfaces over decades.

Firing these complex, mixed-media objects presents challenges that require careful planning and execution. Williams fires her totem elements in an electric kiln, which gives her greater control over temperature than wood or gas firing, but she often introduces local variations by using saggar firing techniques — enclosing clay elements in containers packed with combustible materials like sawdust or salt to create surface effects that are partly unpredictable. The iron elements are not fired; instead, they are treated after the ceramic elements are complete, sometimes with wax or oil to stabilize the rust, sometimes left entirely natural and allowed to continue their slow transformation in the air.

The decision about how to treat the iron surfaces is one that Williams makes differently for each piece, depending on what she wants the relationship between the two materials to be. In some totems, she applies the same wax finish to both the ceramic and iron elements, creating a unified surface that minimizes the visual distinction between them. In others, she deliberately emphasizes the contrast, allowing the iron to remain bright and active while the clay surfaces are matte and settled. This kind of decision-making — about unity versus contrast, about stability versus ongoing change — is where her philosophical approach to materials becomes visible in the physical object.

[STUDIO_IMAGE: close-up of ceramic totem pieces and rusted iron farm implements being assembled on a studio floor, diffused natural light]

Meaning and Symbolism in Williams’ Totem Work

The question of what a totem means is inseparable from the question of what it is. Williams is thoughtful about the symbolic dimensions of her work without being heavy-handed about them, and she is cautious about over-explaining what individual totems are “about.” She has said in interviews that she thinks of her totems as objects that hold questions rather than answers — they are not illustrations of ideas but containers for accumulated significance. The worn farm implements she uses carry meanings that she did not put there: the labor of farmers now gone, the specific geography of Midwestern agriculture, the relationship between human effort and natural process. Her role is to provide a context in which those meanings can be experienced rather than explained.

There is a clear tradition in American ceramic art of using the vessel as metaphor — the container as a symbol for human interiority, for memory, for the body itself. Williams extends this tradition into three-dimensional sculptural form while retaining the potter’s sensitivity to the relationship between inside and outside, between what is held and what is shown. Her totems are not vessels in a functional sense, but many of them incorporate hollow clay forms that imply containment — cups, cylinders, dome shapes — embedded in the vertical structure in ways that suggest they are holding something invisible. This creates a quality of reserve in the work, a sense that the most important thing about a totem is what it does not reveal.

The vertical orientation of the totem form itself carries meaning that Williams explores consciously. The upward movement of a stacked column of forms suggests aspiration, growth, and the relationship between earth and sky — themes that are entirely consistent with both the agricultural origins of her materials and with broader human experiences of reaching toward something beyond the immediate. By grounding her totems in the heaviest, most earthbound materials — cast iron, stoneware, fired clay — and allowing them to rise toward lighter, more refined elements at the top, she creates a visual narrative that moves from labor and earth toward something less defined and more open. It is a quietly powerful compositional strategy that gives her work a resonance beyond its immediate material presence.

The Broader Context: Farm Implement Art and Rural Creative Practice

Williams is not alone in seeing the artistic potential of discarded agricultural equipment, and situating her work within a broader community of rural-based artists helps clarify what is distinctive about her approach. Across the American farm belt, a tradition of welded iron sculpture has flourished for decades, producing works that range from purely decorative yard art to ambitious gallery pieces. Many of these artists share Williams’ interest in the expressive qualities of worn metal, but relatively few of them combine iron with clay in the way that she does. The addition of ceramic elements changes the conversation fundamentally, bringing in associations with domesticity, craft tradition, and the female body that pure iron sculpture rarely carries.

The rural creative practice that Williams exemplifies has its own particular rhythms and resources. Working in a small-town studio rather than an urban art center, she has access to materials that would be difficult to source in a city — not just the farm implements themselves, but the community knowledge about where to find them, the relationships with farmers and auctioneers that allow her to acquire pieces with histories attached. This kind of situated practice, rooted in a specific place and its specific material culture, produces work that could not be made anywhere else. It is one of the arguments for why rural art-making matters: not because rural audiences are underserved (though they often are) but because rural places have visual languages that deserve to be explored by people who actually know them.

The reception of Williams’ totem work within the broader ceramic art world has been thoughtful and engaged, with critics noting both her technical accomplishment and the way her work resists easy categorization. She is not quite a sculptor in the conventional sense, not quite a potter, not quite an assemblage artist. This resistance to category is part of what makes her work interesting, and it reflects the genuine complexity of what she is attempting. Making totems from old farm implement parts and clay is, at its deepest level, an act of translation — taking the mute evidence of agricultural labor and transforming it into objects that speak, however quietly, about what it means to work with one’s hands on the land, and what remains when that work is done.

• Found agricultural implements serve as both structural and symbolic anchors in Williams’ totems, carrying embedded histories of rural labor.
• The combination of stoneware clay and aged iron creates a dialogue between two materials shaped by fire and use in complementary ways.
• Vertical composition in totem form allows Williams to create visual narratives that move from earth-bound weight toward openness and aspiration.
• Her work exists at a productive intersection of ceramic tradition, folk art, and contemporary sculpture, resisting simple categorization.
• Rural studio practice gives Williams access to materials, relationships, and visual languages unavailable to urban-based artists working with similar themes.

[STUDIO_IMAGE: finished clay and iron totem sculpture standing outdoors in a field at golden hour, long shadows and warm dusk light]

The enduring power of Marian Williams’ totem work lies ultimately in its honesty — about materials, about process, and about the particular piece of American experience it draws from. In a moment when so much contemporary art traffics in irony and conceptual distance, there is something quietly radical about making objects that ask to be taken seriously on their own material terms. The old iron speaks. The clay holds. And the totem stands as witness to the long conversation between human hands and the earth they work.