Excerpt from Musee Interview with Icons in Ash founder, Heide Harty
Musée Magazine: This is a conversation with the deceased – an homage to their legacy. These are their very ashes made into a portrait of themselves. How did it feel to start using ashes of people you didn’t know to create such long-lasting pieces for their loved ones and for yourself?
Heide Hatry: I like how you put it: “a conversation with the deceased.” That’s exactly what it is, and an homage to their memory!
When I started to develop this as an art idea, I had strong and strange feelings to touch the ashes of human beings, but I suppose that uppermost among them was the feeling that this substance was something precious and that, unlike almost every other action one might take as an artist, I had to be extremely careful and specifically about the material itself.
But the far more disturbing aspect of the matter as I began offering to make portraits for others was the idea that I, as a German artist, making something out of human ashes, would involuntarily and almost inevitably conjure thoughts of the Nazi atrocities for many viewers. I was so troubled by that possibility that I had to give up the whole project for several years, not seeing how it wouldn’t cause pain or anger rather than the solace that I intended. It was only after I researched specifically what the Nazis actually did and what they intended that I could resume it, because I knew that my purpose was exactly the opposite of theirs: where they wanted to obliterate a whole people and make it as though they had never existed, to destroy them, and eliminate every trace of them, I am remembering, preserving, honoring, and making present what is lost to us. To me, this is an act of reverence.
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