Timothy

A bar of soap and a dish, both made with the cremated ashes of a human. Lye collected from the washing of the ash to make a glaze for the dish was used to cast a bar of transparent soap. Echoing the bereavement in the form itself ash glaze pools deeply in the vessel: two sides of a wheel-thrown plate, the centre removed, the edges re-joined.

From raw clay, to semi-opaque glaze, to transparent soap and light, the materials trace a transition from the permanent to the already dissolving; earth, to air, to light.

In firing, the atmosphere of the kiln stretches organic cycles of time into the geological. But the two objects are not static. Glimmering in the light between them, opalescent glaze and soap are suspended between being and not being; the not-yet and forever. The transparent soap took on the gentle traces of my hand from the mould, so, already in motion, the objects offer the bereaved a ritual: something to wash away with a part of himself, and something that will remain.