About the Works

All artwork by 

Heide Hatry from 2009-2016.

More information at Ubu Gallery, New York

 

Unlike the traditional means of memorializing the dead in art, these human ash portraits propose an intimate and direct means of engaging their memory, and their substance, rather than the fairly detached, abstract, heroic, or clinical approaches that have typified modern western art and funerary practice.

Three different techniques have been used to create slightly different effects:

(a) Loose ash particles from the person depicted (and birch coal and white marble dust) are applied in a painstaking mosaic process into beeswax, bedding the ash gently into the wax.

(b) Ink drawings or air-brush paintings are created directly upon a pure and slightly uneven surface of ashes.

(c) Ink drawings or air-brush paintings are created upon an emulsion of ashes and binder, giving the portrait the feeling and texture of a fresco mural painting.