Earth Ovens, Philosophies and Stories - Kiko Denzer - BS008

In 1994, I left my last day job to try and make a living by art. I had no idea what that would look like, but a friend who taught anthropology invited me to a slide presentation by a guy who had worked with peasant craftspeople all over the world — mostly helping them to build better devices for cooking with wood. His name was Ianto Evans, and when he returned from his travels, he realized that the problems he was trying to solve were not in fact caused by poverty, but by the economic systems required to establish and maintain a wasteful, exploitative, profit-driven consumer society.

That spring, as part of a larger goal of de-consumerization, Ianto was teaching a workshop on how to build a mud house for next to nothing. So I gave him some of my shrinking funds and, with a wonderful group of folks, mixed mud to build a beautiful little cob cottage, as well as a wood-fired oven. That summer, I sculpted Minnesota and New York mud into a couple of ovens for family members. The ovens, in addition to giving me a wonderful medium for larger-than-life sculpture, also gave me the key to making the kind of truly wonderful bread I had eaten as a child in rural France. I sent Ianto pictures, and he invited me back for more mud work with more wonderful folks.

My vision of art up ’til then had been dominated by a love for stone carving — but I didn’t like the art world, which seemed frivolous, driven by ego and money rather than beauty and service. To me, beauty is what we live by, and cannot live without — like sunshine, grass, and water. The point of life is to pa… Read More