From roaring fire and molten glass an artist creates a healing ritual

In 2015, the US artist Jonathan J Harris began a work titled In Fragments centred on his ancestral home, High Acres Farm in Shelburne, Vermont. Grappling with his family’s complicated history of trauma, Harris performed a series of 21 ‘rituals’ at the farm over the course of six years to prepare himself and the land for a brighter future. This short film documents his 12th ritual, ‘Phase Change’. For the project, which took place on 1 November 2016, Harris and his fellow Vermont-based artist Ethan Bond-Watts built a cob furnace into a hillside on the farm. The pair then spent an entire night feeding the roaring flame in an effort to blow a single glass vessel made from a mixture of materials found on the land and the cremated remains of Harris’s mother. This short film captures Harris’s process as he creates ‘a new sacred object, unique to our land’ from the ground up. You can read more about Harris’s project here.