ashes

When ceramist Chris Smedley was asked by a client if he could make a unique commemorative piece using the ashes of the client’s father, he didn’t know what to expect. When he set about experimenting by using the ash in a glaze, he found that it produced a range of colours from green to blue through to purple. “These effects,” he suggests, may “come from minute traces of metal oxides that collect in our bodies during our lifetime.” Fascinating!

Liking what he saw, Chris, in partnership with Kieran Challingsworth, established Commemorative Ceramics in the crowded and ever-expanding market catering to people looking for creative and befitting ways with ashes. There’s plenty of room here for more good ideas.

You like? I like.  A lot. They deserve to do well.

Prices from £300. Good value, I’d say. Better still, there’s a promotion to celebrate the launch of the enterprise running til 31 October 2010: 25 per cent off the entire range.

Find Chris and Kieran’s website here.

Aesthetics. Taste. What’s naff, what’s ravishing? We’ve been there before in this blog and we’ll go there again. Bandit country.

The clothing, merchandise and interior decor of death is dignified, is magnificent, is horrible. It’s whatever you think it is. Undertakers’ frock coats.Traditional coffins with their sonorous names: Arundel, Chatsworth, Montacute. Chapels of rest. Hearses. ‘Floral tributes’. Headstones. ‘Memorial items’. Ashes urns. Cremation jewellery.

Coffins have become a lot more eye-friendly. What of the rest? It is notable that, in the matter of memorialising, some Brits, rather than be seen dead in a conventional cemetery, take themselves off to natural burial grounds where they can be sure to have none of it. That’s a strong reaction.

I’ll declare my own position on all the ashes urns I’ve ever seen: With the exception of the ARKA Acorn Urn I don’t like them. This one in particular.

But I really like these, above, from a group of artists based in California. They’ve even made me rethink the desirability of keeping ashes at home.

They’re called FUNERIA. Click through and see what your eyes think.

So, I say, good taste will always hide behind convention because it is too timorous to do its own thing. Good taste, for all that it parades itself as self-restraint and decorum, is nothing but creative paralysis.

Where funerals are concerned, one person’s emotional truth is another person’s sentimental incontinence. If there’s a taste war going on out there (and, by jingo, there is) it’s very one-sided. The good-tasters rage against frightfulness; the bad tasters happily and obliviously get on with it.

Blessed are those who do their own thing.

If you didn’t see it, Channel 4’s half-hour film last Friday, Ashes to Diamonds, is well worth a look. It points up the problem with ashes: what to do with them? And it follows people who followed their hearts and had them mixed with oil paint, made into diamonds and blasted from shotgun cartridges.

I spoke to the film’s maker, David Brindley, when he was researching the project, and I emailed my congratulations to him after I’d watched it. Here’s part of his reply:

I’m mainly pleased that it genuinely seems to have stirred up thoughts in the minds of those watching as to exactly what to do with either existing ashes or their own once they’re gone. I’ve had lots of emails from people saying that they had no clue half of these options were even available to them.

If you missed it, you can see it here.

I spent a joyous day on Friday at the National Funeral Exhibition, an expo dedicated wholly to the merchandise and service providers of death. How much fun can that be? A lot, let me tell you. A great occasion for dismal traders (any colour so long as it’s black or green). Surreal—and sublime.

But you don’t want to know about new generation hearses or the man holding masterclasses in reconstructing smashed up heads. Me neither. We are much more interested in lovely people doing life-enhancing things, aren’t we?

People like Paul Sinclair, the motorcycle funeral man. He’s a national treasure. At the end of the day he gave me a ride in his sidecar and then, knowing I’d once had one, let me drive it. Woo-hoo stuff. I’m still thrilling.

For me, two stand outs. The first was Sarah Walton’s memorial ware.

The urge to commemorate our dead with a vertical physical marker (flat won’t do) is as old as humankind. It’s an urge that’s not going to be educated out of us, for all that we can see that conventional cemeteries decay, their older graves testaments to amnesia. The natural burial movement has yet to address this to the emotional and spiritual satisfaction of their clients, most of whom find it hard to curb the urge to mark the spot.

As Thomas Friese has it, “As presently conceived, green burial forbids or strictly limits enduring grave markers to favor ecological factors. This is a short-sighted aspect of its conception, which forgets that a cemetery is not merely a place to dispose of dead bodies but to memorialize and honor human lives. A majority of society will not accept no memorialization; widespread acceptance will thus be impaired.”

I don’t have the answer. But I have a belief that a physical marker does not, for many, need to be over the spot where the body lies—or the ashes. And that’s why I am a believer in the garden memorial. It’s close. It beautifies where you live. You can take it with you when you move.

Sarah’s bird baths and doves are sculptural rather than utilitarian. They are as beautiful as anything I have ever seen. Technically, they are astonishing. They are hollow, you can keep ashes in them, but you don’t have to. No photo does justice to them.

I’m going to talk her up wherever and whenever I can. Get used to it. Check out her website. Not only is she an artist, she is also, you will want to know, one of the very warmest, nicest people in the world.