How An ICONS IN ASH Portrait Commemorates Your Loved One

An excerpt of the chapter “How Much Death Can Life Bear” by Josef Wetz, from Icons in Ash, a collaborative conceptual artist’s book, culminated by founder Heide Hatry.

Hatry’s ash portraits are able to undertake an essential task. Commonly, during grief work, the mourner regularly calls the deceased back into remembrance: in order, on the one hand, to ascertain their proximity; on the other, however, to envision their displacement. The dead person really is no longer there. In this way, it gradually becomes even clearer that the departed is, in fact, irretrievably gone.

The ash portraits are able to make over precisely this double function: they both confront mourners with the missing person in the form of their portrait; while the ash out of which they have been artistically shaped allows their death to be reflected. The ash portrait creates a fictional encounter with the deceased, which can help the mourner to cope with the implacable event, as many experience a strong need to speak with the dead person for a while longer, to sense them somehow, to establish and sustain emotional contract with them. This unaccomplished need is understandable; after all, the dead leave behind them of vacancy.

Often, the communication is abruptly broken off. For this reason, the bereaved commonly turned to photographs, which they place around themselves in order to step into an imagined dialogue with the one who has been silenced. In peculiarly intensive ways, such as communication is possible with the ash portraits, which emerge from the human remains of the dead person.