MATERIAL NOTES #02

There is something about smoke that refuses to stay still.

It moves through a room, settles into wood, clings to fabric, changes the taste of food and leaves traces on whatever it touches. It is difficult to hold, difficult to contain and impossible to fully separate from the environment it inhabits.

Perhaps that is why I found the smoke sauna such an interesting place to begin my studies in the EKA Craft MA.

Our first field trip took us to Albi Talu in Viljandimaa, led by the warm and endlessly enthusiastic Rasmus Jensen. It was an introduction not only to the Estonian smoke sauna, but to a way of thinking about craft that I am increasingly interested in: craft as something that exists between materials, people, place, knowledge and time.

Rather than arriving with a particular object to make, we arrived with an environment to investigate.

And there was smoke everywhere.

A building that is also a material

The first thing that struck me about the smoke sauna was that it is difficult to understand it simply as a building.

A conventional building attempts to keep its environment under control. Walls separate inside from outside. Windows regulate light and air. Chimneys remove smoke. Materials are selected for particular functions and generally expected to stay where they have been put.

The smoke sauna does something rather different.

There is no chimney. When the sauna is heated, smoke fills the interior, circulating around the room and interacting with the timber structure. The fire heats stones, which retain that heat long after the flames have died. Eventually the smoke is ventilated and the room is ready to be used.

The building therefore becomes part of a process rather than simply a container for one.

Wood becomes fuel. Fire becomes heat. Heat becomes steam. Smoke becomes flavour, smell and atmosphere. The walls themselves gradually absorb the evidence of what has happened inside.

This is a very different understanding of material from the one I often encounter in a workshop.

We tend to talk about materials as things that can be selected, manipulated and transformed. Glass is heated, blown, cast, polished or broken. Metal is forged, melted, stretched or cut. Clay is shaped and fired.

But the smoke sauna reminded me that materials can also transform each other.

Smoke transforms wood. Wood transforms smoke. Heat changes both. Food takes on the characteristics of its surroundings.

The process is reciprocal.

And perhaps this is where craft becomes particularly interesting.

A tradition carried through doing

The Estonian smoke sauna tradition is particularly rich because the sauna is not simply an object of cultural heritage. It is a collection of practices and skills that are maintained through doing.

UNESCO inscribed the smoke sauna tradition of Võromaa onto its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014. The listing encompasses not only bathing, but the making of bath whisks, the building and repairing of saunas, and the smoking of meat.

That distinction feels important.

The heritage is not the building itself.

It is the knowledge of how to build it, heat it, use it, repair it and pass that knowledge onwards.

This is something I have been thinking about a lot since beginning the MA. What exactly are we preserving when we talk about craft traditions?

Is it the object?

The technique?

The material?

The knowledge?

The ritual?

Or the relationships between all of these things?

Perhaps it is all of them.

The smoke sauna makes this particularly visible because so much of its knowledge is embodied. You learn by being there. You learn how the wood burns, how the smoke behaves, how the stones respond, when the room is ready. You learn through repetition and observation.

It is knowledge that lives in the hands and the senses as much as it does in words.

Smoke as an ingredient

Our time at Albi Talu also shifted the smoke sauna from something we were studying into something we could experiment with.

Food became one of our materials.

We explored smoking as a culinary process, experimenting with ingredients and combinations that were sometimes quite conventional and sometimes decidedly less so. There were sausages, fish, almonds, fruit, herbs, vegetables and various things that were perhaps better described as experiments than recipes.

I particularly loved seeing the ingredients laid out before they entered the smoke.

Everything looked strangely beautiful in its raw state. Dried plants, bundles of herbs, nuts, fish, fruit, paper, string. It had the appearance of a material library rather than a kitchen.

And this made me think about the relationship between food and craft.

Cooking is often described as a form of transformation, but smoking makes the process unusually visible. The material does not simply become something else. It carries evidence of the process with it.

The smell remains.

The colour changes.

The surface changes.

The flavour changes.

The smoke leaves a record.

One of the experiments that stayed with me was the use of baking paper underneath the ingredients. After spending time in the smoke, the paper itself became a kind of material document. The smoke had marked it with soft, ghostly impressions and stains.

I found myself more interested in the paper than I expected.

It had become a record of the process.

The almonds sitting on top of it were one thing. The marked sheet beneath them was another. The paper showed where the ingredients had been, how the smoke had travelled around them and what had happened over time.

It made me think about how often we overlook the materials that sit beneath the main event.

The support.

The packaging.

The surface.

The residue.

The thing that was never intended to become the finished object.

Yet sometimes these are the things that carry the most information.

The beauty of residue

This idea of residue has been appearing more and more in my thinking about craft.

I am interested in what remains after a process has taken place.

Glass remembers heat.

Wood remembers fire.

Metal remembers pressure.

Paper remembers smoke.

Food remembers everything.

There is something compelling about these traces because they resist the idea that making is a clean sequence of actions with a clearly defined beginning and end.

Instead, processes leave things behind.

Marks accumulate.

Surfaces change.

Materials absorb information.

The smoke sauna is essentially built around this principle.

Its walls become darker over time. Its timber holds the smell of repeated fires. Its stones hold heat. Its tools become worn through use. The knowledge of the process is carried from one generation to another.

The sauna is therefore both a place of transformation and a record of transformation.

Making a meal together

There was another kind of material experiment taking place throughout the trip, and that was the making of a temporary community.

Our cohort is international, with students arriving from different backgrounds and different approaches to craft. There is something slightly awkward about meeting a group of people for the first time and immediately being expected to become a community.

A smoke sauna is quite a good solution to this problem.

There is food.

There is fire.

There is work to be done.

People naturally start passing things around.

Someone is cutting something. Someone else is tying herbs. Someone is tending the fire. Someone is asking what something is. Someone is making something slightly questionable and everyone else is watching to see whether it will work.

Then you eat it together.

It is difficult to remain strangers for very long under those circumstances.

The trip became an exercise in collective making, but without the usual boundaries of a workshop. We weren't each standing at our own benches working on individual pieces. Instead, knowledge and labour moved between us.

Someone knew how to prepare something.

Someone knew which plant we were looking at.

Someone understood the fire.

Someone had an idea for an ingredient.

Someone else was willing to try it.

The making became social.

And perhaps this is another aspect of craft that I want to carry with me through the MA.

Craft does not always produce an object.

Sometimes it produces a relationship.

Looking beyond the expected

I also enjoyed the freedom to approach the food experiments without needing them to become successful recipes.

There is something liberating about treating food as a material for investigation rather than simply something that needs to taste good.

What happens if this is smoked?

What happens if that is dried?

What happens when different plants are combined?

What does the smoke do to the surface?

What does it do to the colour?

What remains after the heat?

These questions feel surprisingly close to the questions I ask when working with glass.

What happens if I change the temperature?

What happens if I introduce another material?

How does the surface respond?

What does the process leave behind?

At some point the distinction between cooking and making becomes rather blurry.

Both involve material knowledge, timing, transformation and a willingness to let the material have some say in the outcome.

Iron, fire and another kind of transformation

The smoke sauna was not the only encounter with fire during our trip.

We also had the chance to watch the EKA Metal Department in the final stages of their iron smelting process.

They had been working with centuries-old techniques to produce their own iron, and we arrived at the point where the long process was reaching its culmination.

It was quite a spectacle.

After spending time thinking about smoke as a material, seeing iron emerge through another process of fire and transformation felt strangely connected.

Here was another group of makers working with heat, fuel, time and materials to produce something that could not simply be bought off a shelf.

The process mattered.

The knowledge mattered.

The physical labour mattered.

And the result carried the evidence of how it had been made.

It was a useful reminder that traditional techniques are not necessarily interesting because they are old. They are interesting because they contain knowledge.

Centuries of experimentation are embedded in them.

Someone has already worked out how a material behaves, what it needs, when to intervene and when to leave it alone.

To learn a traditional process is therefore not simply to reproduce the past. It is to gain access to a body of accumulated material knowledge.

Craft as a way of paying attention

This, I think, was the most valuable thing I took away from our first field trip.

I went to Albi Talu expecting to learn about smoke saunas.

I came away thinking about materials.

About how materials communicate.

About the traces that processes leave behind.

About knowledge that is stored in bodies and repeated actions rather than written instructions.

About food as a material.

About smoke as a material.

About fire as both a tool and an agent of transformation.

And about the spaces in which making happens.

The smoke sauna does not separate craft from everyday life. Building, heating, bathing, cooking, eating, repairing, gathering and remembering all exist within the same environment.

There is something very appealing about that.

As someone coming into the Craft MA with a background in glass, I am used to thinking quite intensely about a particular material. Glass has always seemed to demand this. It has its own temperatures, timings, limitations and peculiarities.

But this trip has already started to widen my understanding of what material practice can be.

Perhaps craft is not only about mastering a material.

Perhaps it is also about learning how to pay attention to what materials are already doing.

Smoke moving through a room.

Paper recording a process.

Almonds taking on the flavour of a fire.

Wood darkening over years.

Iron emerging from ore.

Herbs being gathered, tied and dried.

A group of people gradually becoming a cohort.

None of these things are particularly spectacular on their own.

But together they form a way of understanding the world through making.

And that feels like a good place to begin an MA.