Denise Ferreira da Silva (2018)
Just as ceramics is elemental in force, it is also elemental on a molecular scale. Of the 118 elements on the Periodic Table, 61 are significant to ceramic processes due to the composition of clay, its mineral and physical properties and the conditions during firing, such as the presence or absences of oxygen in a kiln and the combustion and decomposition of organics components. These 61 chemical elements are also the determining factors in the aesthetics of ceramic glazes, their colour and texture revealed through the elemental force of heat.
When brought into a contemporary artistic and ecological research practice, ceramics offers the possibility of critically investigating and expressing elemental insights into deep geologic time — as well as much more recent stories of entwined human and environmental histories that, throughout the period of modernity, have escalated into planetary-wide crises.
By witnessing ‘with heat’ through the ceramic process, Manchester Driftwood, Forest and Chicxulub investigate the cataclysms of past extinction events, as well as our current environmental crises amidst the Sixth Mass Extinction and so-called Anthropocene. These three artworks all derive from sites with histories of intense earth-altering heat, each marking a phase of climate crisis and extinction. All three are watery sites today — the rivers and canals of Manchester in the UK, the sludgy coal ash dams of Australian’s East Coast power stations and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, on the western margin of the Atlantic Ocean.
Yasmin Smith
Manchester Driftwood 2025
Manchester Ship Canal driftwood ash glaze on stoneware slip (detail)
Throughout the period of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, the rivers and canals of Manchester, connecting to the Port of Liverpool, became the dumping ground for large amounts of toxic waste: coal ash, dyes and chemicals from factories. A legacy of heavy metal contamination remains in sediments of the Mersey and Irwell catchments, while modern agricultural pesticides, industrial effluents and urban runoff continue to pollute waterways.
For my work, I gathered branches floating in the Manchester Ship Canal, which I then cast in clay and subsequently burnt to produce the ash glazes for the ceramic cast sculptures. The colour and texture that emerged in the glaze revealed what the plants had absorbed in their lifetimes and, through this, the ecological and human history of the site — elements present in the water, soil and air absorbed over time are retained by the plant as a form of memory or archive.
Manchester Driftwood addresses plants growing in these riparian ecologies and their potential to express insights into histories of contamination. It is possible, in this way, to trace the chemical legacy of the Industrial Revolution, which profoundly influenced the social, economic and environmental conditions on earth. The rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, causing the acceleration of global warming seen over the last 200 years, finds a point of origin in the first large-scale coal economy that fuelled the factories at the heart of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, a ground zero for the industrially induced Anthropocene. The wealth accumulated throughout this period enabled Britain’s colonisation of territories across the world, including the Indigenous lands of Australia, where I was born, as well as Sri Lanka, where my mother was born.
Of course, it was not just the extraction of fossil energy in the form of coal that was so vital to Britain’s Empire building, but also the extraction of energy through slavery and forced labour in their plantation colonies, for the production of the raw materials such as cotton, sugar and tobacco, just to name a few, which were nourished by the soil, water and resources of Indigenous lands. As Brazilian philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva points out, when considering the origins of the Anthropocene in extractive and racialised colonial systems, ‘What has been and is extracted through colonial juridic mechanisms and racial symbolic tools — the “means of production” or the “raw materials” it uses for accumulation (the internal energy of African slaves and Indigenous lands)—now exists as the form of global capital’ (2018).
Research image: Manchester Ship Canal 2025. Film still: Elle Fredericksen
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Manchester Driftwood, 2025, MA Art and Ecology Degree Show, at Goldsmiths University of London, London, photo: Elle Fredericksen, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Manchester Driftwood, 2025, MA Art and Ecology Degree Show, at Goldsmiths University of London, London, photo: Elle Fredericksen, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist
2025
Yasmin Smith
Chicxulub 2025
45 data derived glazes on stoneware slip (details)
The 200km-wide impact crater was only discovered in 1978. It lies partly under the Caribbean seabed and partly under rainforest on the Yucatan Peninsula. In 2022, I started to collaborate with Professor Kliti Grice, renowned organic and geo-chemist and world-leading expert in the geological and environmental causes of mass extinction events. Professor Grice leads the Western Australian Organic & Isotope Geochemistry Centre (WA-OIGC) at Curtin University in Western Australia. They provided me with fifteen samples from a core drilling extending from the peak ring of the Chicxulub Crater to a depth of 1.3km below the crater floor.
Chicxulub presents cast ceramic replicas of these samples with a suite of ceramic glazes derived from the chemical analysis of each sample. These are presented in three vertical lines: the overall chemical glaze aesthetic on the left, the major and minor elements in the centre and the trace elements on the right. In descending order, the first five samples of each vertical line come from the post-impact sediments, which washed back into the crater in the subsequent tsunamis, forming calcareous rock. At 620 meters below the surface, the core passes through the extinction line. This is indicated by a break in the vertical lines and is reflected in the sudden shift in the character of the glazes of the ‘target rocks’, which are the five samples below the extinction line. These rocks were chemically and physically transformed by the immense heat and severity of the asteroid impact into a type of melt-bearing impact rock called suevite breccia, containing shocked and unshocked fragments of rocks, minerals and glass, fused and cemented together. The lower five samples are the oldest, known as ‘basement rocks’, where at times melt-rock dikes cut through the formation — visible, for example, in the glaze of sample fourteen.
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Chicxulub, 2025, MA Art and Ecology Degree Show, at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, photo: Elle Fredericksen, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Chicxulub, 2025, MA Art and Ecology Degree Show, at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, photo: Elle Fredericksen, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist
View of the Chicxulub impact site from space. TIM PEAKE, ESA/NASA ©ESA
2022
Yasmin Smith
Forest 2022
eleven coal fly ash glazes on stoneware slip (details)
top to bottom:
glaze 11: Tarong (Tarong Power Station, South Burnett region, Queensland)
glaze 10: Mount Piper (Mount Piper Power Station, Lithgow, New South Wales)
glaze 9: Wallerawang (Wallerawang Power Station, Lithgow, New South Wales)
glaze 8: Millmerran (Millmerran Power Station, Darling Downs region, Queensland)
glaze 7: Bayswater (Bayswater Power Station, Hunter region, New South Wales)
glaze 6: Eraring (Eraring Power Station, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales)
glaze 5: Vales Point (Vales Point Power Station, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales)
glaze 4: Gladstone (Gladstone Power Station, Gladstone, Queensland)
glaze 3: Hazelwood (Hazelwood Power Station, Latrobe Valley, Victoria)
glaze 2: Yallourn (Yallourn Power Station, Latrobe Valley, Victoria)
glaze 1: Energy Australia (unknown location)
In 2022 I completed a four-year research project into coal ash in Australia. Through collaborations with community, scientists and industrial workers, I collected ash from eleven different power stations in Australia to make the glazes that furnish ceramic casts of coal rocks. The glazes in Forest show a gradation in colour spanning a timeline of 300 million years. The lightest glazes come from the oldest black coal ash; having been underground for 250-300 million years, this coal has leached out most of its organic and inorganic life. As the seam progresses, the glazes begin to take on more colour. The youngest brown coal, that is 23-66 million years old, express a much richer glaze aesthetic as they still retain their mineral and plant memories.
Growth> death> coalification> extraction> reduction> return. From the Industrial Revolution onward, sections of humanity have dug vast amounts of coal from the earth leaving voids where forests once stood. A seam of geological time is removed. The coalified remains of these ancient forests are burned and its ashes resown back into geological time, returning the ashes to the earth’s surface and creating a new stratum.
When considering the massive, industrialised extraction and use of coal undertaken by humans since the mid-19th century as a contributing factor to changes in earth’s systems and climate, I think about the morphological changes that this activity leaves behind: the physical void 300 million years down, where coal was removed from geological time and the drastic changes to contemporary terrain to reach those depths. To officially enter the Anthropocene into the geological record, however, evidence of humanity must be defined in geochemical strata as it is laid down on the earth and contributes to a new geological age. If you ask what humans contribute to the geological fabric of the earth, one answer is fly ash from coal combustion. The spectrum of the coal-ash glazes in Forest, presents a visual understanding of this geochemical contribution and narrates this timeline over 300 million years.
Vales Point Power Station, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia. Supplied by Hunter Community Environment Centre.
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Forest, 2022, at The Commercial, Sydney, photo: The Commercial, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist
Installation view: Yasmin Smith, Forest, 2022, at The Commercial, Sydney, photo: The Commercial, courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney © the artist
Yasmin Smith: Elemental Life, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
3 October 2025 – 8 June 2026
Further Reading:
Brazil, R. (2021) ‘Marking the Anthropocene’, Chemistry World. Available at: https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/marking-the-anthropocene/4012969.article.
Evans, S. and Viisainen, H. (2023) ‘Revealed: Colonial rule nearly doubles UK’s historical contribution to climate change’, Carbon Brief. Available at: https://www.carbonbrief.org/revealed-colonial-rule-nearly-doubles-uks-historical-contribution-to-climate-change/.
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2018) ‘On Heat’, Canadian Art. Available at: https://canadianart.ca/features/on-heat/.
Gulick, S.P.S. et al. (2019) ‘The first day of the Cenozoic’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(39), pp. 19342–19351. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1909479116. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1909479116.
Hurley, R.R., Rothwell, J.J. and Woodward, J.C. (2017) ‘Metal contamination of bed sediments in the Irwell and Upper Mersey catchments, northwest England: exploring the legacy of industry and urban growth’, Journal of Soils and Sediments, 17(11), pp. 2648–2665. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11368-017-1668-6.
International Commission on Stratigraphy (2024) ‘Working Group on the Anthropocene’, Stratigraphy.org. Available at: https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene.
Weir, K. (2024) Rethinking Nature, MADRE/Arte’m, Naples, 2024.
PDF available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uvKsxJIWAX5fRuzDldzXqw6YwDtkiyG2/view?usp=sharing
Winn, P., Lynch, J. and Woods, G. (2019) Out of the Ashes II: NSW water pollution and our aging coal-fired power stations. Newcastle: Hunter Community Environment Centre. Available at: https://www.hcec.org.au/out-of-the-ashes-ii.
Yusoff, K. (2024) Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
background image (flames): Research Image: Yasmin Smith burning Paramatta River mangrove wood for Drowned River Valley, 2018 commissioned for the Biennale of Sydney 2018, curated by Mami Kataoka, photo: Elle Fredericksen.
background image (grey): Yasmin Smith, Ash Grey, 2025, coal fly ash paint on wall installation view Yasmin Smith: Elemental Life, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2025, curated by Jane Devery and Manya Sellers, photo: Hamish McIntosh
acknowledgements:
Elle Fredericksen, Professor Kliti Grice, Amanda Rowell, Kathryn Weir
Dr Ros Gray, Dr Jol Thoms, Fred Gatwick
Jane Devery and Manya Sellers
(Manchester Driftwood) Orla Forrest, Kalika Kulukundis and Sangita Mulji, Rachel Loos and Michael Streeter.
(Chicxulub) Professor Kliti Grice and the Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry (WA-OIG) Centre, Curtin University, WA.
(Forest) Dr Ingrid Schraner and the Coal Ash Community Alliance, Johanna Lynch and the Hunter Environment Centre, Dr Jane T Aiken, Nick Wills, Dr David Law and Egan Rahmat Dirgantara, Anthony Callen, Tom Prendergast, Fly Ash Association of Australia.
Yasmin Smith was awarded the 2024 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, supporting her work within the Master of Art and Ecology program at Goldsmiths.