Yasmin Smith: Forest

It is with pleasure that The Commercial presents Yasmin Smith — Forest, the first exhibition of the artist’s four-year investigation into coal fly ash glazes sourced from eleven coal-fired power stations around Australia.

“The specific glaze aesthetics derived from a plant’s ash is directly related to the life of the plant, its biology, the soils in which it grew and the underlying geological, hydrological and cultural conditions that makes available certain minerals and elements to sustain its life.” […] “61 of the 118 elements on the periodic table are determining factors in the aesthetics of ceramic glazes.” (Smith)

Where until now, Smith’s wood ash glazes have mostly told stories of plants’ accumulation of nutrients through their lifetimes, Forest is a story about their afterlives, the dissipation and return to the biosphere of those elements over many millions of years. It is also about where humans enter the narrative with their interruption of this eons-deep cyclical process via mining and the exploitation, in various ways, of the carboniferous remains of ancient forests. The magnitude of this exploitation as evidenced by the volume of coal fly ash (Smith's glaze material) created as a bi-product of industrial-scaled coal combustion is such that a new geological sedimentary record has been laid down in our otherwise minuscule human-scaled time. Smith's eleven coal glazes of Forest narrate this timeline over 300 million years.