action 11: with ash and chiara / to be continued

I did not tell Chiara about this photo, so… surprise!

Chiara and I have been working towards a collaborative action, and we figured no time like the week she moves here, huzzah!

We both share a passion for the exploration of materials. Mostly, natural materials. What they can do when manipulated, how we can help bring out hidden expressions within them, and how these findings can show us deeper meaning and opportunity for the material.

We talked about materials we were both familiar with but could try to revisit again, milk glue, linoleum, ceramics, wood ash….ASH! That was the winner for now. Something we could both get our hands on (figuratively, not literally of course. Ash is caustic and must be collected and handled with care).

Preliminary research found so many uses for wood ash — soap, ink, gardening, pest control, leavening, the list goes on and on.

At risk of being overwhelmed with options, we jumped in. Chiara used her ash (which came from the burning of graveyard crosses — an interesting German burial fact is behind that one), as ink. She also tried some casting and moulding with it. We will see if it dries in time before her flight out on Saturday!

One of the main reasons I was so excited to return to ash was because it was where I started in my practice. So, I took my two buckets of wood ash collected from my dear friend’s wood stove in Whistler to the ceramics shop. Cranked on the ventilation system, dawned an N95, safety goggles, and a book on ash glazes from the VPL, and got to work. After 1.5 hours of sifting, I called it. My poor hands are not used to my new climbing hobby. I managed to finish half of the ash, sifting it through three different sizes of mesh before mixing it into glaze.

The beautiful thing about ash glazes is the ambiguity. I do not know how these will turn out. This is my first time sourcing ash from my buddy Jon’s cabin. The mineral componants of the ash are comprised of the variety of wood burned, plus anything they’ve thrown into the fire, matchsticks, newspaper, cardboard, sweepings from the floor, anyone’s guess! The two things I do know, are that the result will be a representation of that place, and that it’s likely to be some shade of brown/green because thats kind of how these tend to go.

I tried my hand for the first real time creating glaze recipes through adaptations of what I’ve read can work. But each source of ash is different and unpredictable. When it is unloaded from the kiln, I will update this post.

This is only the beginning of this action. We are so excited to continue these explorations through the break and beyond. Rather than ending, it feels like studio is only just beginning.

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