Wildfire Ash, Reduction Fired Stoneware

2025

‘I hope it works/ Material Dances’ presents a series of performing objects, both in terms of function and their theatre: their ability to tell stories.  This is intensely distilled in Duet, a bar of soap and dish to hold it both made with ash left in the wake of wildfires in Greece in the height summer 2024.

I travelled to to this hot, blackened landscape in Evia days after this devastating fire. Dust clinging to our sweat, I listened to accounts of the verdant island it was, the incremental parching of the land as temperatures rise here and globally and the political, natural and human consequences of these now reoccurring fires.

I washed the ash, skimmed off the caustic lye that bubbles out at first and, ordinarily discarded, used it to make this bar of soap. With the sieved and dried, powdery remnants I make a glaze. It pools in the finger marks of  a momentary act that might just have happened. Performed then with the ease of a jazz musician, I am implicated permanently though the intense heat of the kiln.

Yet unused, a rectangle of soap, willing us to remain in the present, smells only of its composite materials. Its cut edges are an invitation: wash, smooth its corners between your palms and leave the traces of your hand in mine.