Comment | How 'archaeological ceramicist' Yasmin Smith has forever changed the way I look at flint

"However, during this most brief of existences, our species has wreaked destructive havoc on a scale only previously achieved by volcanoes and asteroids. But whether seismic eruptions, extraterrestrial bombardments or the more recent spate of human-caused upheavals, each event forms part of the earth's great continuum; and whatever the cause, all come accompanied by a proliferation of chemical reactions that deposit a wealth of revealing mineral evidence in their wake."

"These buried alternative histories and the traces they leave within the fabric of our planet form the substance, both physical and conceptual, of Yasmin Smith's thought-provoking sculptural installations. Elemental Life, her current solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney (until 8 June), reveals how this Australian-born artist uses ceramics and glaze technologies to decipher and interrogate deep and often highly vexed interconnections between human and environmental histories."

"Drawing on plant and mineral materials gathered from a wide range of locations ranging from remote parts of Australia to urban France, Southern Italy and Sichuan Province in China, she's developed an archive of site-specific glazes which also function as chemical records of place and time, offering what she defines as an "alternative knowledge system", that throw new light on the history, ecology and geology of these different terrains."

Yasmin Smith makes sculptural installations and ceramics that employ site-specific glazes derived from plant and mineral materials collected across diverse locations. She treats glazes as chemical records that archive place and time, forming an "alternative knowledge system" that illuminates ecological, geological and historical interconnections. Works include salt-glazed vessels using Sydney Harbour materials, ceramic coal lumps glazed with ash from coal-fired power stations, and collaborations to glaze stoneware using ash from other sources. The glazes function as material evidence of environmental processes and human impact, translating buried mineral traces into tangible investigations of deep temporal continuities.

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