Kilns and ovens

It's not unusual to find fire bricks along the beaches of the French Shore. I picked up these two today in Conche. They are the remnants of bread ovens made and used by migrant fishermen in times gone by. Just outside of Conche, in Crouse, there is an archeological dig happening. They are unearthing a French fishing site that was used from the 17th to 19th centuries. On Monday I had a tour of the site with Peter Pope, professor of archeology at MUN. The highlight of the tour for me were the bricks and stones that Peter says made up an oven that was probably used as long ago as the early 19th century. They are still in place where they stood against a wall of rock that functioned as the rear wall for the oven, although the arch and side walls have long since collapsed.

The French started making bread ovens in Newfoundland not long after the revolution in their homeland. One theory has it that the process of democratization instigated a desire for a few basic human rights - access to fresh food, for instance. Peter tells me there were no English bread ovens in Newfoundland contemporaneously to these early French ones, which I think is no surprise since the descendents of English settlers in Newfoundland still have no appreciation for fresh local foods.

I was lucky to discover that I am not the first to build an oven in this area, and that there is a tradition - albeit a lost tradition since the French were banished from their fishing grounds - of oven construction here. I'm going to take these two bricks to the Grey Islands with me and incorporate them into my kiln. They are beautiful and ancient, perhaps 200 years old, perhaps brought across the Atlantic from France, rounded and smoothed by the ocean, and still bearing a smoky colouring from countless uses. I realize it may be an archeological transgression to take these from the place where I found them, but it would equally be an artistic transgression to not acknowledge the precedents of local history and culture in my project.