Our story

Brought together through a shared love of charcoal, and taking our name from what Chinese burners historically called the process, Soul of Fire Artists' Charcoal is the product of conversations between artist Jade de Montserrat and charcoal producers Jo Edwards and Paul Cookson. We have created Soul of Fire to make this wonderful, sustainable art material more readily accessible - to artists and to students, no matter what their age or ability.

​We met in the summer of 2021, when Paul, Jo and the Green Aspirations team worked with Jade on her Live Charcoal project at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, which took place over 5 days around a traditional ‘earth-burn’. Drawing classes, charcoal workshops, readings, and wood carvings all happened around the burn, and the event culminated in the film which shares our name, “Soul of Fire”.

​Charcoal was one of the first drawing materials, and has been used over time for everything from cave drawings to preliminary sketches to highly finished drawings. The flexibility of the marks and tones makes it ideal for all sorts of projects, but we realised that there’s a problem – commercially-made charcoal is only available in small sizes, and the finished product has become totally disconnected from what it actually is. How many people pick up a perfectly uniform piece of charcoal and connect it to the willow or other tree it came from?

We want to change all that.

Our charcoal is handmade in Scotland in a charcoal retort. The retort is a modern, super-efficient kiln but still demands a traditional approach, with wood-colliers tending the fire during the cooking process. This process makes high-quality materials that reflect the nature of what they are. So, our artsit charcoal isn’t uniform. It has the bumps and bends that we find in the branches. Our charcoal isn’t tiny. We process the whole tree, eliminating waste and resulting in much chunkier and more accessible pieces. And our charcoal isn’t ‘machine-perfect’. We process all our wood by hand, from cutting the trees, to packing the boxes. 

​Unlike other producers, we don’t grow our own willow for the charcoal or buy it in from other suppliers. Our sticks come from an area of woodland that was due to be commercially cleared, so we offered to cut and use the willow instead. What we don’t use for willow charcoal sticks will go into BBQ charcoal, firewood, or another purpose. We’ll continue to source our wood in this way, to make sure it’s sustainable.

We’ve set up Soul of Fire as a social business, reflecting our beliefs that natural materials and sustainable art supplies should and can be accessible to all. The profits we make from selling the charcoal to galleries, shops, and art schools will be used to support our social mission – of making this wonderful material more readily available to schools and communities and of sharing the story of how it is made. By doing this, we hope to be able to replace some of the less sustainable but more accessible drawing materials and to introduce people to the joys of a more natural and connected way to making art.

​We see our charcoal as a way to honour tradition, to pay respect to and connect to the earth's resources. We are eager to work with schools and communities who are interested in sustainable art making and our shared responsibility to our earth and climate.