Work
DIRECTED RESEARCH
**IN PROGRESS**Reliquia: hearth + ritual
There is a certain tenderness that exists in the act of inviting someone into a home for the specific purpose of creating a meal for them. Three elements (shared space, shared time, and shared meal) all intentionally curated by someone for someone are encapsulated in the notion of the hearth. The hearth as I understand it holds more gravity than a fireplace. It is a center for gathering, for production and combustion, for warmth and care. Its physical manifestation translates these notions through solid monolithic forms, materials capable of absorbing and resisting heat, and its centrality in its immediate physical contexts.
I intend to recenter the hearth as a sacred space. One where daily ritual is enacted. It elicits a level of intention, of intimacy, of social interaction within the home. It is shaped by its inhabitant’s habits: carved, eroded. This action of sharing a meal, but more importantly one person planning and executing the cooking of a meal for another, is one that has the possibility of existing on a daily basis, as seen with a mother caring for her child, but it can also be part of a cherished celebration that only happens once a year.
I will extract this action from the confines of the home and examine it in the form that it originated in. This sacredness assigned to a shared meal, as described by Thomas Foster, is communion. I will examine this act of gathering anchored to and facilitated by two different scales. I will understand the ways that ritual is enhanced through spatial and object design.
I will do this by examining the hearth in two different scales in relation to each other, which take form of the designing of a chapel and of a literal hearth. This will create a complex specifically designed to host and encapsulate this idea of gathering around a hearth for a meal as an intimate social act. The site of this complex is in a place where cooking, ritual, ceramics, and mythology intersect–Mexico City.
Summary:
I will be examining the hearth through scalar interpretation, which will delve into the implications of the hearth as a space that hosts and as an object that enables the sharing of a meal. This is to highlight the tendency of people (take note of the vagueness, the universality of subject) to gather, centered around an object or concept, as a form of shared intimacy, as an expression of love whether it be from one person to another or from a person to something larger than themselves.