‘Architecture for Smoke’ incense burners
‘Architecture for smoke’ incense burners, by jonathan cross
Fusing art and craft in his Joshua Tree workshop, Jonathan Cross uses wood-firing techniques to give his hand-carved stoneware an eroded, otherworldly patina. At once geological and post-apocalyptic, his vessels have garnered a cult following among collectors.
Cross’ ability to coax the ephemeral out of the solid is what attracted us to commission him to make a trio of incense burners, a typology that he has experimented with for the last couple of years. ‘For Wallpaper*, I created incense burners that have a very strong architectural feel,’ explains Cross. ‘Some have more than one aperture for the smoke to escape, so it creates different kinds of patterns in the air. It’s really beautiful to watch.’ Ironically, Cross is not an incense fan. ‘There are very few smells that I enjoy, so I don’t actually burn incense. But a lot of my design is based on imagination. I imagine the way the smoke might work.’
Cross’ ability to visualise a concept undoubtedly stems from his background as an artist. An avid illustrator since his youth, he grew up copying his favourite comic books, Spider-man and Spawn, which helped him to develop a strong sense of line, contour and silhouette that he retains today. Trained as a painter and printmaker in his hometown of Dallas, Texas, he went on to work at Los Angeles’ legendary Gemini GEL artists’ workshop, producing limitededition prints with artists including Bruce Nauman, Joel Shapiro and Ellsworth Kelly.
‘It was kind of a fluke because I was actually just going to visit the space, but the manager thought I was there to look for a job,’ says Cross. ‘One of my absolute heroes in art, Richard Serra, was the primary artist I worked with while I was there. He was a joy, but I kind of stopped making art because I was exhausted from working on the prints all day long.’
Cross discovered ceramics by chance, when he started collecting cacti: ‘I couldn’t find any decent or interesting planters, so I started taking clay classes at the local junior college and it never stopped.’ In 2008, he left Gemini GEL, committed to the kiln and took a master’s degree in ceramics at Arizona State University. There he was introduced to the ancient
‘Anyone who does woodfiring is probably a bit of a pyromaniac. You play with fire for a four-day period’
technique of wood-firing and was encouraged to develop a more art-based practice.
‘Anyone who does wood-firing is probably a bit of a pyromaniac,’ he laughs. ‘You play around with fire at extremely high temperatures for a four-day period. Gas-firing is still pyromania, but you don’t have to stay around the kiln the whole time. For wood-firing, you have to add wood to the kiln every five to ten minutes.’
The wood-firing process is not only labour intensive, but unpredictable as well. ‘There’s a whole art to loading and firing the kiln, but there’s always a bit of randomness that comes with that,’ says Cross. ‘I’m still learning. I’ve only fired the kiln fewer than 20 times in the three years I’ve been out here. Each wood creates different surfaces on the work; the different kinds of clays that you use change the colour of the ash; the oxygen levels vary. All of those factors change how the surface of the work will come out,’ he explains. ‘I invest a lot of energy in designing the individual pieces. Once they’re carved, loading them into the kiln breathes a new life into them and reinvests my interest in the work. All of a sudden they become a new object through a process that I don’t have complete control over.’
For Handmade, Cross fired the kiln with cottonwood, a desert tree, to create the incense burners’ rough, pitted texture that almost resembles lichen. The burners were carved from a commercial black clay, mixed with sand that Cross took from around the workshop, and a white clay that he makes in the studio. ‘The black clay always fires so that it looks like old steel or iron, and in other parts where there’s more ash, it looks like more of a rusty or mossy accumulation of texture,’ he explains. Weighing in at around 10lbs each, the statuesque burners feel like they originate from another time. ‘I’m inspired by that whole “a long time ago in a galaxy far away” kind of historical future,’ says the artist. ‘I grew up looking at National Geographic and Jacques Cousteau’s archaeology and then 1980s post-apocalyptic sci-fi. These elements coalesce in the work. There’s a modern yet ancient feel in the forms that suggests a former grandeur, but also a real beauty developed through time and the erosion of the form.’ jonathancrossstudio.com