Introduction
The trails are more legible on the black, hydrophobic soil now that fire has ashed the coastal chaparral. To collect ash for ceramic glazes, we follow the paths written before the blaze by rabbits and rodents, coyotes and deer. Sometimes we gather from single, identifiable plants, pale shadows of ceanothus and yucca and laurel sumac.1
Fired ceramic cones stand near ruptures and entanglements, mapping assumptions about safety and danger. Orange-red Phos-Chek falls from planes in patterns ahead of fire lines, a rhythmic mark-making desperate to control the consequences of a warming world. Lines of ash and ink on flammable paper trace smoldering geopolitical anxieties and rage. We ponder impermanence and recall culturally seared memories of horror and the resilience of the survivors.
Our thinking about how people and other things live together in a fire-prone landscape evolved from experiencing interrelationships within Japanese satoyama landscapes as well as from an art festival that foregrounds resilience based on cultural ties to place. The first references for our cones were the “tsunami stones” in Japan that warn villagers not to build their houses below a certain point. The stones represent an attempt to extend human memory to a geologic scale.
In installations and performances, we’ve tried to hear the voices of the things we work with—the clay, the ash, the fire. As a kind of polyvocal storytelling, this work encourages our awareness of what swirls through and within us, of what we breathe in, the grit on our fingers and in our teeth. We follow pathways through transitory spaces where the destructive and the generative seem indistinguishable. A hibaku seedling has sprouted.
1. Iterations of Pyrometric have appeared since 2014 at the Sam Maloof Center for Arts & Crafts, Cal Poly Pomona, The Los Angeles Arboretum, Allan Hancock College, Visions of the Wild Festival in Vallejo, CA, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, California Lutheran University, and the Wildling Museum. The work has been featured in C-File and American Scientist.
Materials and Processes
High- and low-fired clay, hand-built and thrown with molds. To make the cones, we made a multi-part plaster mold of a borrowed traffic cone. We pressed the clay to the interior of the mold using a revived traditional coil-building technique called nejitate that we learned in Echizen, a ceramic village in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. In Echizen, we also studied the past and present of wood-fired, ash-glazed ceramics.
In California, we riffed on centuries-old ceramic wood-firing practices by partnering with a local fire department during a training exercise to place ceramic cones in a burn. Different clay bodies, glazes, and construction techniques had different things to say.
Bat Cone, 2014. Clay, underglaze, terra sigillata, smoke, ash, performance firing.
Laser-cut templates from digitized retardant splatter patterns; Phos-Chek flame retardant, wildfire ash, and medium. At one point, we were living near an airport where the tankers would land to reload with Phos-Chek during fires anywhere within hundreds of miles. In between refilling planes, the crew chief filled a few buckets of the powder for us and handed them down from the elevated storage tank.
Ink on mulberry bark paper from Echizen, Japan, 40”x 84.25”. The drawing recalls the fire and moths in “Flame Dance,” a 1925 painting by Gyoshu Hayami.
Terracotta and local clay platters, glass, burn-salvaged California black walnut, sager-fired plant materials
- Hummingbird Sage (Salvia spathacea)
- Dusty Miller (Centaurea cineraria)
- Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia)
- California Buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum)
Persimmon seedling descendent from a tree that survived the bombing of Hiroshima.
Photo by Brad Monsma.
Amiko Matsuo is an artist and educator whose work focuses on transmigration, cultural exchange, and translation. Her recent installations explore place, identity, and materiality in the fire-prone landscapes of the anthropocene using ceramics, ash, and Phos-chek flame retardant.
Brad Monsma is a writer and educator and the author of The Sespe Wild: Southern California’s Last Free River. His essays have appeared in High Country News, The Surfer’s Journal, Kyoto Journal, and a number of anthologies.
Together, they are co-translators of Art Place Japan, a book about an art festival focused on community and environmental resilience. They have also developed Pyrometric, a series of installations and performance pieces about material collaborations with fire.
