Wake

Wake is a social sculpture activating a bar of soap made with ash collected in the wake of a wildfire in Evia, Greece, 2024. Washing with the wildfire ash soap is an individual action that becomes collective through the sharing of a single object.

With food and drink, the wake allows us to collectively metabolise the substance that embodies our grief (often ash), where together - exchanging stories, memories, photographs and candid videos on our phones - sharing our forms of love with one another offers hope in the horizon. As such, in the case of Wake, the normativity of gently partaking, becomes a way in which grief, responsibility, guilt, loss and care are understood and negotiated through the body.

In washing with and of, Wake functions within the complexity of our relationship with environmental crisis in the everyday. The work is created through its use, both in the collective act and in the reshaping of the soap itself.

Wake was first performed with delegates of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires Conference at Imperial College London, July 2026.