Yasmin Smith makes visible memories lingering in the land through installations using ceramics and handmade glazes. Her work involves extensive field research and cooperation with a wide range of collaborators, including scientists, activists, and industrial workers. One of the main themes in her work is ash glaze. The ash glazes she produces using the ash created from burning plants reveal the char- acteristics of the land where they grew, as the minerals that the plants absorbed from the landscape show as colour and textures in the aesthetic of ceramic glaze. She expresses in her art the memories etched into the land in locales such as Australia, France, Italy, Nigeria, United Kingdom and China.

With Forest, the artist created ceramic sculptures, slip cast from real coal lumps that she gathered from a mine south of Sydney. She has glazed these sculptures using coal fly ash from eleven power stations on Australia’s Eastern Seaboard and in inland areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. Smith states that encountering ash from coal-powered steam cranes on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, during her presentation at the Sydney Biennale in 2018, led to her decision to make visible the composition of ash from as many coal ash dams as she could access. Coal was formed over tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years when plant matter of the distant past accumulated at the bottom of swamps and lakes, and was eventually subjected to high heat and pressure under the earth’s surface. In Forest, the oldest coal ash glazes are lightest in colour dating back 300 million years. The younger ash glazes, 18-23 million years old, are still dense in mineral elements, presenting richer glaze tones. It is the differences in the age of the coal and the amounts of organic and inorganic matter that were contained in the vegetation due to various envi- ronmental factors that produces the different colors in the glazes created when the ash is fired. The various tones and textures of ash glaze manifested in this way are an elemental connection between the vegetation of the ancient past, the environment it was subjected to, the enormous time required before it transformed into coal, and traces of modern industrial activity. Through her spectrum of coal fly ash glazes, Smith presents aesthetic evidence of humanity’s contribution of coal fly ash to the geological record.
The ceramic elements are presented on a wall furnished with a paint made using coal ash sourced in the Nagoya area.