A number of years ago, I developed a project in the final year of my degree that explored alternate ways of treating and distributing the ash of the deceased. Each option made use of the natural or mechanical degradation of material to slow down the release of the ash. Scattering the ash can be cathartic, offering closure or a release. It can also be painful, unduly pressurised, it can go wrong (everyone has heard the carry-on accounts of the ash blowing back into griever’s faces). These objects were designed to prolong the process of ash distribution to give those grieving time to grieve. No forced ceremony, no having to make a decision about the most significant time and place, no symbolic burial, no explosive release of ash-via-firework into the stratosphere. Just a slow, quiet release.

The objects I produced were physical proposals, they were real, viable design objects that you could hold in your hand, that offered another way of doing things. I continued in this vein for some time after graduating, developing a more commercially viable iteration of this work. As a collection, they got a fair amount of exposure, they toured museums and galleries, they were published, they generated discussion; they became international placeholders of potential for the material culture of death.

I have folders in my inbox full of willing customers; people who were enquiring for a loved one and people enquiring for themselves; some whom were terminal and wanting to exercise their last will. Though not all responses were supportive, in Milan I was met with expressions of revulsion when I explained that the coloured powder from my shakers was meant to represent human cremains (I could hardly use the genuine article in the gallery of a Paul Smith store). On-line I was compared to Nazis by one commenter, who likened my proposal to turn people into pencils after they die with the soap production from the body fat of concentration camp victims.

Nothing could prepare me for the reactions to my work, probably because I didn’t design their release into the world. It just happened. And so their journey has been an organic one, appearing and disappearing from my consciousness for some months or even years at a time. Until Tuesday.

This is my official declaration that I am revisiting this project with the aim to put something back out into the world in a more refined and thoughtful way.