Manchester Driftwood 2025


The colours and textures that emerge in the ash glaze of a plant reveals knowledge of a site that we may not have been able to see without the chemical transmutation from ash to glaze.

Yasmin Smith
Manchester Driftwood 2025
Manchester Ship Canal driftwood ash glaze on stoneware slip (detail)

When the wood, bark, leaves or fibres of a plant are burnt, most of the carbon burns away and what remains in the plant’s ashes is an elemental memory. The colours and textures that emerge in the ash glaze of a plant reveal knowledge of a site that we may not have been able to see without the chemical transmutation from ash to glaze.  

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).

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The Journal of Art & Ecology published by MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

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