(chopping wood)
My name is Yasmin Smith and I'm an artist from Sydney
I am a ceramicist mainly,
but I concentrate my work on using ceramic glazes
as evidence of, I suppose chemical narratives
that exist in particular sites.
The process that I undertake is
to go to a particular site of interest,
explore the ecology and the geology
and the human history of that site.
And then I collect plant specimens from which I will make
ceramic replicas in usually stoneware clay.
The next step of the process is that I will then
burn those branches down, the original specimens down to ash
and take that ash to create a ceramic glaze
that furnishes the outside
of the replicas of those ceramic branches.
There's a variety of different colours
that you'll get in the glaze.
And that's because the ashes of the plants
retain inorganic elements that they collect from the soils.
So, you know, for example,
if a tree is growing in the central desert of Australia,
it's taking in a lot of iron oxide
from the very rich red soils there,
compared to say plants that have been growing
in the Paris Basin, which has,
taken in a lot of calcium,
which is one of the, you know,
the geological elements of the Paris Basin.
So the work is titled 'Seine River Basin'.
The form is 44 ceramic tree branches
that have been cast from plant specimens
that I had collected while I was on residency
in Paris for five months.
I've made one cast of 22 different types
of shapes of branches.
And then I've recast those 22 branches again,
but flipped them over as if to sort of give the audience
the impression of the reflection of trees
on a body of water.
I'd been invited to participate
in an exhibition platform called Cosmopolis,
which was put together by Kathryn Weir
at the Centre Pompidou.
And she'd invited me to China
where I did a two month residency
at the end of 2018 for Cosmopolis #1.5
and then to Paris for Cosmopolis #2,: Rethinking the Human.
My intention, a very broad intention of the project,
was to collect wood from the river systems
of the Seine River Basin and the riparian ecology.
So that's the riverbank ecology.
One of the ecologists that had replied to me, he...
we ended up meeting and collaborating
and he took me on a tour of the River de Seine
from its spring in,
near Dijon in Burgundy back to Paris.
When I did get to Paris,
and I found my way into different
kind of collaborative relationships with people,
this just organically led to the selection of locations
where I would find wood.
So, for example, Jean-Francois AsmodĂ©,
who was the ecologist that I worked with,
he had a connection with an NGO
that cleaned the River Marne.
So that was my first port of call,
to look for some wood.
And it was this group that provided me with a section
that became Willow from the banks of the river
that had been glazed and formed.
So once I'd found the Willow from the Marne,
I thought, okay,
I'll try and find some more Willow trees.
And through the help of these new friends and relationships
that I'd formed,
we ended up finding an arborist who had cut down a Willow
tree from the river Seine,
right at the confluence of the river Yonne
and the river Seine.
At the Yonne,
which is a bit outside,
a bit upstream of the sort of main hub of Paris,
I'd collected Willow from the banks of the river
that had been cut down and had been left
by the side of the river and a 60
metre long by five metre tall pile of wood.
I also collected driftwood that had collected
at the ecluse
at the beginning of the lock of the river.
The fourth site was actually the St Dennis canal,
which is sort of to the north east of Paris city.
That's probably the location of like the most densely
populated with human habitation.
In terms of its pristineness,
it's probably the least pristine of all locations.
One of the aspects of the research is not only to look at
geology and plant biology,
but also to look at human history.
If there's been any activities
that have happened at that site
whether that's mining or, you know,
heavy agriculture or just mass habitation,
sometimes humans can leave a chemical trace behind and quite
often, you know,
the trees that grow in those areas show evidence of that.
And that evidence comes through in this aesthetic glaze
representation.
For example,
you know,
a tree that I did in the flooded forest of Tasmania
was a celery top pine.
And it came out with more of a purple glaze
and purple is indicative of manganese dioxide.
So I got the ashes tested and that's something that I also
do with every project is to get the ash tested
at a lab for its metal content.
And in that particular case,
it showed that that plant had more manganese dioxide in it
compared to iron, for example,
which usually iron dominates because it's so ubiquitous in
the soils.
So I did a little bit of research on manganese dioxide,
you know, toxicities around that area
and there was quite a lot of information gathered since
around about 2009
in those local towns where there was high
levels of manganese dioxide in the lakes and the groundwater
due to runoff from local mine tailings, for example.
This is an example of a mould that I would make
of a branch.
So this is how it comes in two parts.
Once you finish the two halves of the mould,
you then remove the original piece
and put back the two
halves back together
and then you just strap them up.
(Yasmin strapping the mould)
And so this is the front of the mould
and the top of the mould.
And it's actually got a,
a hole like, which we,
which is called, like,
I suppose the funnel where we'll pour the liquid clay into,
in order for it to set inside in the shape of the internals.
And this is the slip it's-
Slip is basically liquid clay.
So it's clay,
that's got a defocculant in it that keeps it suspended,
keeps all the clay particles suspended in a liquid.
(clay mixer)
And that just gets poured straight in the top
and you have to have these tight so that it doesn't explode
and clay go everywhere.
And so what'll happen is the,
the plaster itself is like quite thirsty for water.
So it starts to draw the water that's contained in the clay
slurry out of what you've just poured inside.
And that will still start to see a small film start to
gather, and the actual,
the level of the slip will drop.
And so over maybe about half an hour period,
I just keep topping it up
until I'm happy with the thickness that
has formed on the drier part of the,
of the pour.
And basically then I just tip that straight back out
and leave it for maybe a day until it gets leather hard.
And I can open up the mould and take the piece out.
This is a triaxial blend,
and this is the way that I test the ash
for the glazes for my work.
So the,
the recipe that I choose is somewhere in the middle,
and I use that same recipe from every project to the next.
So it really never changes.
That way each glaze from one project is comparable to the
next one.
This is an example of the glaze when it's mixed with water.
So in here is the,
the ash along with the two other glaze materials.
And I just take that mixture and literally paint it on
the outside of the bisque fired clay.
And so when it goes on, it looks, it looks grey,
but then when it comes out,
once it goes through the firing process and all of the glaze
melts,
that melting helps to show the colours of the metal oxides
that were actually inside there.
When the ash,
when I collect the ash,
I basically burn it in a non contaminated environment.
So an environment where there's, you know,
no rusty bits of metal or anything like that,
and I will burn it slowly, because if you burn too quickly,
you burn away the ash.
So I'll burn it over a week or something like that.
And then I sieve it in a,
I sieve the ash in a,
in a spaghetti strainer to get rid of any of the big bits.
And then that's it.
That's what I basically mix water with for the glaze.
There's 61 elements on the periodic table that will have an
effect on glazes or ceramic processes,
but what I'm,
what the glazes tend to respond most to in terms of
chemicals is metals that produce colour.
So the work Seine River Basin has this light yellow colour
throughout the whole work.
And this is reflective of a very light iron content in the
soil.
It also has a very matte finish,
and that could be due to the extremely high levels of
calcium that are found across all four sites,
across all four glazes and trees that have grown there.
And that calcium is really a very old geological formation.
So that's why I get this
kind of laboratory breakdown.
So I actually get 52 elements tested.
What this shows me as a sort of in a numerical ordering of,
of the amount of metals that are found in each ash.
And so from that,
I can go back to the glaze aesthetic
and draw a sort of
comparative narrative between what this empirical evidence
says and what well,
what is also in some ways empirical,
but interpretive and speculative evidence from
the glaze.
Some of the,
the main differences that I found or interesting differences
that I found,
was the amount of strontium that was in the
Marne and the St. Dennis canals woods,
which are closer to the city.
There's potential that
in areas where there was more habitation, that,
that the strontium might be present because of that sort of
human activity or input.
There's a couple of other really cool examples of that
happening with some of my other works.
This is actually a pear ash from Shepparton in Victoria.
And you can see that it's gone this kind of red-y, purple-y
colour.
Well, this is the pear ash in reduction.
So again, this is where the,
the flame of firing the kiln is starved of oxygen.
And it starts to eat the oxygen out of the,
in this case,
copper that was in the ash of the pear tree.
So when it was fired in oxidation, it was this copper green.
And when it was fired in reduction, you got this copper red,
and this shows pretty well that example there.
That was an interesting story because when I got the,
when I got the glaze results back from that work,
and I thought it looked like a copper green,
I went and I asked the farmers why they'd be more,
why they'd be more copper in that glaze, in that,
sorry,
in that tree.
And he told me that until about the 1970s,
they used to spray this tree with copper oxide to make the
fruit go brown.
And they stopped it, yeah,
they stopped it in the seventies,
but that orchard was actually 150 years old.
So it was subjected to, you know,
almost a hundred years of being sprayed directly with copper
oxide.
And that was just retained in the wood.
Yeah, making work on a residency like Seine River Basin,
you know, in Paris for five months.
It's an,
it's quite a difficult experience at first.
You know, it's not, it's not easy,
but you have to be to be quite
open to the world
and not too precious
about what you thought you might be doing
and, and let,
let the work or the research evolve
depending on what becomes available to you.
I think I was speaking about this before,
it's more like a collaboration with the world
than it is trying to cause your entire, you know,
put the world into the box that you want to see it through.
You know, a lot of it,
a lot of the time I spent in Paris was trying really hard
to, to find materials,
to find collaborations and spaces to work.
And then a lot of luck,
I think by putting myself out there,
by being open to,
to new relationships and situations that sort of allowed me
opened up more opportunities, you know, for the work to,
to evolve and to be produced, you know,
and you come across major, major difficulties,
kilns breaking down, you know,
having to rely on people you don't know that well
is often difficult,
but I think in those tough stitch situations,
you tend to actually form quite enduring and special
relationships with people, yeah.