The Plateyard

Isabel Arroyo

Every day, a different pickup truck parks in the warehouse driveway, loaded with white buckets full of clay and cloudy water. The buckets are very heavy; sometimes bucket-plastic breaks and sludge leaks all over the path to the plateyard. It’s better to cradle them from below than to hold them by the handle.

I don’t know where the truck drivers go during this part. I’d thought it’d be in their contracts to help, and the fact that it wasn’t frustrated me a little at the beginning because around the ninth bucket without a break your arms start to freeze up. But now I appreciate it, because when there is no one around you can put in AirPods without the office saying they’re an eyesore. Just make sure to take them out once you’ve got all the buckets to the plateyard.

The plateyard is a large and smooth rectangular space inside the warehouse, closed in on two sides by exposed brick walls and by plexiglass on a third. The fourth side opens onto the stables. Right now, there is some clay on its floor that only needs to be re-wet, but it’s not enough for a good plate and nowhere near enough for a bowl. It has to be thicker. I flip each bucket upside down and smack the underside until the clay shlucks away into bucket-shaped heaps. Then I run to get all the empty ones out of the room because white buckets with red logos are an eyesore.

It turns out I’ve gotten the buckets away just in time, because there is a school group here to watch the plating process from start to finish. They are led by a company guide in a grey uniform with the silhouette of a round foot printed on the shirt pocket. The kids have been warned this will take a while. Some of them wander up and down the viewers’ corridor behind the clear wall, while others press their noses to the glass.

The clay heaps are sagging and it’s time to get the Flattenstick, which was patented specifically to smooth plateyards for Glindaprint bowls. It is wooden—unsanded, unglazed, and splintery––and roughly leg-length. You’ve got to lean into it hard, but it gets the clay lumps flat like nothing else if you’re committed to not using motors.

The kids watch for a bit and then get bored, but the adults who have filed in behind them watch with more interest. How often do you see one person doing every step of a job from start to finish? The plexiglass looks like it would be soundproof but it’s not, and I hear a woman in the viewing corridor tell someone else that 94% of Glindaprint clay is sourced from the local community. I hear that so much it must be on a placard.

Still, the adults lack the compulsory patience of the schoolchildren and a few of them drift off to the gift shop at the end of the warehouse. But it won’t be too much longer before the yard is full enough of level clay. The school group––third graders, apparently, here to learn about the differentiated platemaking business, to be followed by a platemaking activity when they get back to school––is getting antsier. The company guide explains that I am preparing the floor for the platemaker, and that I’ll help the platemaker finish her work.

He tells them I’m part of the local community, which is important because one of the reasons this company is special is that it brings jobs to the local community. No kid asks how this company survives competition with the much-larger output of Veo’s ceramic branch, but the guide explains that it has to do with some little things called quality, standards, and care. Every product churned out by those guys at Veo is the same. No heart. Here, each work is necessarily different from others; each is an instantiation of an unreclaimable spontaneity, the purity of experience translated into matter, into earth, into plate and bowl, and it appeals to a different caliber of audience than the one Veo is gunning for. A little girl taps on the glass to ask how many employees the company has for smoothing out the plateyard. The guide tells her that there are two smoothers, and then explains the difference between an employee and an independent contractor.

There was a third contractor at the plateyard until a few weeks ago. Her name was Layla, and she always wore AirPods when she carried the clay-buckets. But she forgot to take them out of her ears during a warehouse tour, so now she makes undifferentiated products at Veo’s garment division. If she makes enough garments to get an invite email through, I’ll go visit her.

The platemaker is an elephant named Glinda; when I lead her by her leash from the stables to the edge of the plateyard, I hear the kids gasp. This is the part that appeals to less sophisticated audiences—and it’s not their fault these kids are unsophisticated, after all, they’re very young, and most of their parents are probably under contract at Veo.

I step to the edge of the plateyard and tell Glinda to dance. Glinda walks forward, bows her head, and curtseys. Then she begins to fly in big staccato leaps that churn up the clay floor. There is nothing in this world like a dancing elephant: I call out positions and she goes through them, more graceful than a ballerina, more limber than an octopus.

The guide begins yelling at the children. Look at her! She is energy, she is the universe, she is the spirit of creation. She is Caedmon, she is Homer, illiterate but inspired; she is the sight that makes one imagine a world where dirt and clay become flesh and grow to topple gods! She will not be poached, here; we extract nothing from her, nothing so crude as the body. Our cows are no machines for milk or meat. They stomp grapes through floor-grates to become fine wines! That’s of no use to you now but come back in twelve years, my friends, we will still be here. Our chickens do not push out eggs; we have taught each one to craft lemonade, and you can buy it in the gift shop.

Afterwards, Glinda lies down, tired, by one of the brick walls of the enclosure. She pants, and I pat her trunk. The leash makes her look less like an elephant than a giant puppy. The children clap and wave to Glinda.

She has stomped many prints with plate-potential today, but it is important that the children see a prime example. I pull out a geometric compass and a knife and search for a perfect one. There. Poking the compass into one––a few millimeters off from the center, perfection is impersonal––then outlining the print with the outer leg of the compass, until a clear enough circle becomes visible. Uncurling the fingers that held the Flattenstick is still tricky, but that doesn’t get too much in the way of cutting out the plate-shape. Then I use a trowel to pry the print up, slide it onto a flat metal sheet, and angle the sheet toward the glass so the kids can see.

One child asks how big the plate is. The guide smiles and asks me to show the kids how big Glinda’s footprint is compared to my own, so I balance on my left foot and raise my right sole so it appears in all its tininess next to the elephant print. The guide snaps a photo; the children clap again; I lead Glinda away, and the children leave.

Now it is time to do the same for all the other footprints, and then it will be time to take them to the kiln and fire them into plates. Loading them will take some hours; the rest of the firing process will be non-public and therefore automated. The last thing to do will be to wet down the plateyard with a hose so some of the clay is still usable for the night-shift smoother.

Glindaprint plates have to be carried to the kiln one at a time. On my second trip from the plateyard to the kiln, I see the gray-uniformed company guide from earlier standing in the hall with an office staff member. He is showing the staff member something on his phone (the phone is not an eyesore, because office work is not outward-facing), but they look up when I pass by.

The company guide looks up at me and smiles. “New shoes?”

I laugh. It is kind of him to ask that, because my sneakers are both worn-out and all but invisible under today’s layer of clay. “Same as always, sir. Maybe a new pair next month.”

The company guide nods. “Take care now.”

The two are still there when I walk back. Their heads are bowed together and their voices sound low and worried. This time, neither one looks up. When I walk back from the kiln a third time they are both gone.

But by the forty-sixth kiln-run, they are back again; and when I have rinsed the clay under the dark plateyard skylight, they are standing there still. This time the office guy, who is tall and lean and wearing a blue button-down, says hey there, and I stop.

He smiles. “Have you ever had your day ruined?”

I ask him what he means, he repeats himself, and I say yes, I think I have, why do you ask?

“Last week, an online customer wrote to me with a fascinating complaint about a very expensive blue-glazed Glindaprint platter. Any guess what that complaint was?”

No guesses at all.

“In the middle of the platter, right at the bottom, staring at him as soon as he sipped away his soup, was a big, nasty, anthropogenic logo, with concentric circles. A sneakerprint, in a Glindaprint bowl. And that ruined our customer’s day.”

I tell him I am very sorry to hear that, which is completely true.

“Thank you. I do appreciate that. But acknowledgement without accountability isn’t enough, and we’ve promised this customer transformative change.”

The company guide takes out his phone and pulls up the picture from hours before, of my shoed foot held up next to the Glindaprint. “We believe you are the person to hold accountable.”

I point out that the sole in the picture is covered in clay and they couldn’t possibly tell if it was the same pattern as the one on the plate, and they respond that actually they could still tell the model of shoe based on the picture, and they looked up the sole and it matched, whereas the night-shift platemaker’s shoes did not, so it definitely was me.

“There must be another explanation,” I hear myself say, aware there is none; and when they are unswayed I say surely there is some version of accountable transformative change that does not require contract termination, no? It won’t happen again. I’ll smooth the plateyard in logo-less slippers from now on. I’ll do it barefoot, right, think about that! The poetic... the poetry of the little human footprint, right there on top of the elephant—totally dwarfed by it. Lovingly dwarfed by it!

The two men look at each other, and the office guy nods. “That’s a good idea. We’ll tell the next contractor to do it barefoot. But now it’s time for you to go.”

Footsteps behind me, and I am suddenly desperate. “You know I have no strikes left, you know what they’ll do—”

The company guide shakes his head. “Two prior terminations is not a point in your favor. Don’t take this personally. You’re not cut out to make differentiated products. At Veo, you won’t have to.”

They must have made the call while I was loading the kiln. There are hands on my shoulders and the voices of enforcers. Now both Glindaprint men are frowning because this is not something they like to watch. The office guy sounds genuinely apologetic. “Please reapply to contract with us when you’re done. Really. If I’m still here in six years, I’ll make sure we don’t hold it against your application.”

The company guide sounds sorry too. “If you see Layla while you’re there, tell her hello. We truly do hope she is well.”

But there are sixty-four Veo Production Centers in the state of Arizona, and the odds of ending up in Layla’s are slim to none.

Isabel Arroyo is a student at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ART | Border Painting 3 by Mazie Wong, 2025. Mazie Wong is a student at Yale University.