ashes

Humanising the ancestors

10 January 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ashes, memorialisation, Memorialising

We get quite a few emails here at the GFG from makers of ashes urns. Most of these urns are ghastly and get no more than a thanks but no thanks. We are unfailingly courteous.

This morning was an exception. We received some stunning images from a Plymouth-based ceramist, Alan Braidford — in answer, it almost seemed, to Richard Rawlinson’s post earlier on today. Wonderful work, we’re sure you’ll agree. There are virtually no makers of funeral urns whose work has evolved beyond the container-of-some-sort stage, but Alan’s urns are anthropoid — they are sculpted figures of humans. What a difference that makes. Depending on size, perfect for a garden memorial or for a family altar to the ancestors. Okay, so we don’t do altars to ancestors. Ours is a developed culture which has lost touch with the value of ritual observances based in an idea of duty. For the sake of our own emotional health, we need to reinvent these observances, and Alan’s work points the way. Do you think they speak too much of grief?

Here is Alan talking about what he does:

My ceramic work is figurative and mostly stoneware. The work is on a domestic scale ranging between 30 to 150 cm in height.

Although my natural impulse is to make sculpture, I am very interested in making functional pieces, and with this in mind I have been developing a series of simplified sitting figures to be used as funeral urns. As this work will be fired to 1250c it will be frost proof, and thus can be placed outside in a garden setting. Ashes or memorabilia can be placed inside the urn through an opening, before the ceramic is fixed to a stone base.

The look of my work is influenced by an interest in ancient history – Celtic, Etruscan, Cycladic and Middle Eastern.

Coiling is the construction process most employed, although I am currently developing a press moulded process in order to reproduce one of the urn designs.  Slips,engobes and lava glazes are used to add surface texture.

Alan is also interested in working collaboratively with bereaved people in the matter of design. If you want to contact Alan, write to him at alanbraidford(at)btinternet(dot)com. His website is here. 

Ashes

2 January 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: ashes, Poetry

Ashes at the funeral home
six hundred still to be collected
small boxes, cardboard, filed in rows
a kind of shell grit for the chickens
fifteen years six hundred still
that somehow somewhere should be scattered:
sown like seed across a paddock
thrown as gravel upon water
or set there upon the mantelpiece
and added to at parties
or dug perhaps in some well-loved
old gardner’s acidic corner
that needs a spot of lime
or tossed aloft like hard confetti
at weddings in the park
where at the end he might have sat
or stowed in brass behind a name
the cemetery as mail exchange
and postbox minus key.
How is it that they cannot face this morning’s meeting long deferred
this grey irrelevance of ashes against what dawn and memory bring
so vertical and three-dimensioned
though growing slowly blurred?
They cannot bear to sign the book
a woman at the counter holds
so long inured to tears.
And some themselves
who would have come
are patient on the shelves.

Geoff Page is an Australian poet. You can read more about him (and more of his poems) here.

Psych-Vikings

10 December 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes, funeral music, music, viking funeral

Here’s some text from Consequence of Sound: 

Everyone deals with death in their own personal way, but psych-rock outfit Crystal Antlers offers a unique perspective on the topic in their music video for “Dog Days”. In said clip, a group of friends commemorate a dead friend by carrying around his/her ashes in various cups and cookie jars, as if said friend is still “one of the guys.” For a final tribute, they channel the Vikings by setting up a funeral pyre and spreading the friend’s ashes throughout the woods.

The song is called Dog Days. Find Crystal Antlers’ website here.

Cremains of the day

23 November 2011
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ashes

We’ve always liked Daisy coffins. They’re a quality product and use a range of lovely looking, renewable materials: water hyacinth, banana leaf, wicker — imported, of course. The people at Daisy are nice, too. 

Daisy don’t just make nice coffins, they also thoroughly understand design. They present themselves beautifully. They use an excellent graphic designer; their ads would look great in any glossy lifestyle magazine. And it’s all a bit wasted on their target audience, funeral directors, who are, of course, much more interested in things like price and whether they leak and creak. Funeral directors have a thing about creaky coffins. 

Daisy don’t sell direct to the public. A great pity; they’d shift a few. 

But they have just started selling urns direct to folk like us. We liked the look of them and asked us to send us one. They did — with a return postage sticker. We took it out to lunch to test reactions. Nobody reckoned it was an ashes container; one person thought it was a box of chocolates — encouraging for anyone wanting to transport ashes in a container which doesn’t shout Dead Man’s Dust at innocent bystanders. 

The urn pictured above is from their leaf range. They do them in a variety of shapes and colours. They are made of cardboard decorated with dried leaves. They’re biodegradable, of course, if you want to bury — and reusable as a memory box, or whatever, if you want to scatter. At £35 they are nicely priced. 

Check out the Daisy Memories website. They do other urns in all sorts of materials. Click here. 

Note to cynics: no, they’re not paying us a penny to say this. We say what we like.  

Brutally creative chaos

10 November 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, ashes, Attitudes to death, ceremony, coffins, Formality vs informality, funeral directors, Good books, Grief

You may remember this post, The Chaos of Meaning, about the photographic essay which Jimmy Edmonds created in commemoration of his son Josh. If you missed it, click the link and go see it; it’s rare that we are lucky enough to post anything so extraordinary and beautiful.

Above is a trailer for a film Jimmy has made about Josh’s funeral. I went to see it earlier this week with; it really is marvellous.

And it complements what Rachel Wallace says in the previous post about the importance of making a record of a funeral.

The coffin, in case you wonder, was handmade by Jimmy with expert help. 

At the weekend we’ll post another film made by Jimmy about life, death, ageing and more. He’s a Bafta winner, is Jimmy. It shows. 

Below is some text from the BeyondGoodbye.co.uk website.

Joshua Harris-Edmonds 
23 May 1988 — 16 January 2011
Forever in our hearts and minds

On 16th January 2011 Joshua Amos Harris Edmonds was tragically killed in a road traffic accident in Vietnam. Joshua was 3 months into a trip of a lifetime travelling across South East Asia. 

He was 22 years of age.  

A life cut short, but a life lived well.

In honour of our Josh and as a memorial to his life, Beyond Goodybe, the website, will continue Josh’s inspiration on others and offer a place to remember, to pay tribute and share their love for Josh with others. 

This site also houses the book ‘Released’ and the film ‘Beyond Goodbye’, family tributes to our Josh and also perspectives on death and the grieving process. 

If you’d like to get in touch, please do: info@beyondgoodbye.co.uk

The chaos of meaning

21 October 2011
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ashes, memorialisation

We have just received the following press release: 

In early 2011, Jimmy Edmonds’ son Joshua was killed in a road accident in SE Asia. 

RELEASED is a photographic essay and a personal response to the tragedy of his son’s death. Intended for publication both as an exhibition and as a book, the project features a mix of Edmonds’ powerful photography and personal poetry.

The title refers to the label on the container holding Joshua’s ashes on which the word “released” appeared.  This becomes the starting point for a personal journey in which Edmonds navigates a way through his own grief to an exploration of photography itself. The “chaos of meaning” he finds lying at the heart of photography mirrors almost exactly his own confusion surrounding the loss of his son.

The result is a work of remarkable depth and drama. 

As indeed it is. Here’s what one of our regular reader, James Showers, thought of it: “I literally gasped at the way you worked with the ashes – treating them with such delicacy, as beauty not as leftovers.”

You can read the entire book fullscreen online here.  You can find the Facebook page here.

Up, up and away…

29 June 2011
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: ashes

“You have landed on the latest, most innovative, honorable, and dignified way to “release” and scatter  ashes, reverently up and away into the air, like a cloud forever and ever. An ash scattering event that is unforgettable, heartwarming and memorable.

Several years of design and engineering were invested to create an automated cremation urn, The Angel Aire Urn. This unique cremation urn completely “releases” and scatters all of the ashes, all with one simple pull of a knob. The cremated ashes ascend up and away into the atmosphere completely dissipating over a few moments.

The Angel Aire Urn is honorable and dignified because the cremated remains / ashes are first loaded by your preferred Funeral Home Director or Angel Aire Urn Representative. Once at your desired ash scattering / release site, with the “pull” of the release knob, the ashes are cleanly scattered from the cremation urn, released upwards and like a cloud away from you and your attendees.“

Angel Aire website here.

Hat-tip to Sarah Murray, author of just-published Making an Exit.

The Importance of Being Urnest

22 June 2011
Charles
10 Comments
Categories: ashes, cremation, funeral customs, Humour

That Brits are born with an acute and possibly pathological sensitivity to absurdity is well known. The Great American Funeral has engendered great and gloriously funny books by Jessica Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, neither of which had more than minimal success in laughing Americans out of their (perceived) absurdity.

There is method in the funerary lunacies of the GAF, of course: they come at a cost to the client. The recent rise in the cremation rate has filled most US undertakers with helpless economic terror, and it is interesting that they have taken no lessons in adapting to this from Brit undertakers, who have been making a tidy living out of burial deniers for as long as anyone can remember.

The GAF has, it seems, some capability to evolve. Burning necessity has begotten ingenious adaptation of the hearse, conserving it as the only fit and proper vehicle not only for the reverent transportation of cosmetised corpses but also the burned and reduced version, cremains. No glove compartment or passenger seat of the family car for them; only the full hush and awe will suffice. And it’s billable!

My thanks to Sarah Murray, author of Making an Exit, for bringing these hearses, more correctly termed urn enclaves, to my attention. She adds: ‘It was explained to me that urn enclaves have “adjustable bier pins” accommodating different sizes and shapes. They flip up from the floor of the hearse and are cleverly stowed again when the vehicle needs to carry a coffin. One brochure tells me that if you don’t want to buy a new hearse or go to the expense or trouble or getting yours refitted, “portable urn enclaves are also available for funeral directors who wish to extend the service of their existing coaches.”‘ Coaches, forsooth!!

Find another YouTube clip (unembeddable) here.

 

Picking up the patriarch’s ashes

15 April 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes, funeral directors, funerals in other cultures

James Showers, sole proprietor of the Family Tree Funeral Company, undertaker to the discerning decendents of Gloucestershire, has been badgering me to rediscover something he lost on his computer. He thought it might be on mine, since I once sent it to him. It’s not. But by dint of indefatigable googling I have unearthed it. It’s far too good to keep between me and James. Here are some extracts which will send you galloping in a jostling, whooping horde to the blog whence it came. By jingo it’s wonderfully well written.

…perhaps you won’t mind if I recount the Funeral Parlor Affair … For lo, and it did come to pass that the sibling and I were obliged to saunter along to the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park to pick up the patriarch’s ashes. For some reason — maybe because we’re not a couple of swooning Victorians — we’d expected to stroll in, palm the urn, and buzz along home.

…

But no. The consummate weirdness with which modern American death-angst imbues the mortuary biz turned what should have been a 5-minute transaction into a Gothic theatrical production that dragged on for half an hour.

…

I dare anybody to keep a straight face who darkens the stoop of the Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home, Mausoleum, and Memorial Park. You wouldn’t believe this joint. It was like the set designers from Twin Peaks and Napoleon Dynamite had fused with Elvis Presley’s interior decorator and been reborn as Liberace’s angst-ridden evil twin, who then suffered a psychotic break, and bought up the world’s supply of harvest gold flocked wallpaper, brass upholstery tacks, and fake oak paneling, and ate it all with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and then puked it up all over the living room from Sartre’s No Exit.

…

But nothing in my education or upbringing could have prepared me for our encounter with the Funeral Director. I almost spontaneously combusted when this specimen materialized out of the Stygian mist. The dude was the ne plus ultra, the transcendental essence, the Platonic ideal of funeral directors. He was still. He was shadowy. He was bloodless. He was creepy. He wore an ill-fitting suit made of larceny and doom.

Here it is.

 

The Modern Mourner

21 September 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, ashes, funeral trends, Humour, memento mori, memorialisation

I wonder if you spent any time over at The Modern Mourner yesterday? If you didn’t, think again and have a gander. It is the creation of Shirley Tatum, a generous spirit who signposts her readers to all manner of more or less wonderful designers. Okay, there’s nothing quite so divisive as taste, but I’m going to nail my colours to the mast here. I love ’em.

Here’s Shirley’s manifesto: My goal is to bring a sense of design to the way we mourn. I’ve noticed how much care goes into the aesthetics of weddings and births, but there seems to be little consideration when it comes to funerals and remembrance. There are so many aspects that need to be overhauled in the funeral industry – from attitudes toward death to industry practices. Design & mourning is a little niche that I’ve chosen to focus on, and hope to make a difference.

Before long I hope she will write a guest post here.

On her site she has an interview with Patrick McNally, aka The Daily Undertaker, whom I think we all admire hugely. If you’ve never been, go now. Here’s Patrick’s response to one of Shirley’s questions:

The word “Undertaker” is actually quite beautiful, but it’s a word most Americans have come to fear. Why is that?
‘Undertaker’ originally described a person who undertook to provide funeral services and goods, not someone who takes your body under the ground, and it had a neutral connotation. However, all words that are used to describe things that we are uncomfortable with end up taking on a negative tinge. When we change the word to remove the negative feeling, though, we solve nothing other than confusing people about what we really do. ‘Mortician’ is a fancied-up job title like ‘beautician’ and Funeral Director was the next step after that, but what does that title even mean? To effect a real change we need to talk openly about death, and stop changing the words associated with it. When you say ‘Undertaker’, everyone knows what you are talking about whether they are aware of the origins of the word or not. It’s plain talk and yes, plain talk has a real beauty to it.

One of the designers and makers Shirley signposts is LBrandt Terraria, which supplies an entirely new receptacle for ashes/memento mori with a strong delight factor,  as evidenced in the pic at the top.