Ardmore artist uses human ashes to craft ceramic memorials

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Through Daniel Hoffman’s hands, ashes of the dead receive new life as art for the living.

Grieving customers send a small scoop of cremated remains to Ahava Memorials where Hoffman transforms the last vestige of a loved one into a ceramic memorial.

Hoffman does not operate his studio inside a cold commercial setting. He runs the small business as a one-man operation from his home in Ardmore.

“It’s a personal service,” Hoffman said.

He meant it in more ways than one.

Hoffman, 43, first utilized the technique more than a decade ago using his aunt’s ashes. A budding animation career pulled him away from his passion for shaping clay. Years later, an abrupt layoff granted him a second chance.

From tattoo framing to glass ash displays, honoring the deceased with or as art is nothing new. With cremation growing in popularity as a form of final disposition, Hoffman is continuing the tradition through his medium of choice. He launched Ahava Memorials in December.

Hoffman molds ornaments as small as a few inches to vases as large as a couple of feet. Instead of mixing the ashes into the earthenware, Hoffman fuses the ashes with the glaze. The result is a marbling and shifting of hues unique to the individual or pet.

“The color of the glaze gets influenced by the ashes and it becomes a one-of-a-kind, more personal memorial,” Hoffman said.

A short film featuring his process was recently shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hoffman said he wants to use his skills to make fine art more accessible and heal others in the process.

“I want people to feel like they can have a work of art in their home that means something personally to them and it’s not out of reach price-wise or time frame-wise,” he said.

How Hoffman turns ashes to art

A cremation chamber burns at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit to transform a human body into ashes. Hoffman’s kiln heats up to 2,000 degrees to finish the memorial.

“In the kiln, that’s where the magic happens,” Hoffman said. “They melt together and all the color interacts.”

The process begins with an online order. Someone chooses the color and shape of the memorial from a variety of options.

Hoffman mails a collection kit along with instructions to the customer. The client then returns the small container filled with ashes back to him.

By the time the ashes arrive, Hoffman has already preshaped the clay pieces. He paints several coats of the base color to the selected option. He then blends the ashes with his glaze recipe and applies it to the final product — which usually takes about a day to avoid flaking on the exterior. The piece is then fired in the kiln.

One of Hoffman’s first customers was family friend Bronwyn Morris, who memorialized Olive, a pitbull-mix who died in January at the age of 15. Olive was the first of her family’s dogs.

The light blue “Christmas ball” piece hangs from a small stand and has a paw print on it. Morris said the ornament makes her smile.

“With pets, it’s so hard because they don’t live that long,” Morris said. “We’ve had six dogs at this point and they’re all members of our family. And so you’re prepared for it, but when the time comes, it’s just never easy. Being able to have their ashes and something to commemorate them close to you in your home is very comforting.”

Morris, 48, said she still has a “good amount” of unused cremated remains.

“Our plans for when my husband and I pass are to also be cremated and have all of our ashes with our pets mixed together,” Morris said. “So, there’s still plenty of ashes for that.”

Modern cremation’s Pennsylvania roots

Cremation dates back across countless cultures spanning many millennia. The 40,000-year-old human remains of an Aboriginal woman in modern-day Australia show some of the earliest evidence of the practice.

From India to Russia, there’s evidence of cremation during the Stone Age, but its prevalence waned and waxed as some religions embraced or rejected it.

Modern cremation began in 1873 with the introduction of a new chamber apparatus in Italy. According to the Cremation Association of North America, the first crematorium officially opened in Washington, Pennsylvania in 1876.

A lot has changed in the industry since then.

There’s been even more change since cremationist and funeral director Bill Sucharski, of Philadelphia, got into the business in 1991.

“Back then the cremation rate — the amount of Americans who chose cremation — was about 15% of all Americans and it has really snowballed and grown,” Sucharski said.

Sucharski was born into the family business. When his father passed, he decided to carry on the torch as the owner of Philadelphia Crematories and the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

Cremation is now the predominant choice of final disposition in the United States — more than 61% of dead people were cremated in 2024.

“Cremation offers you a myriad of ways that can be personalized to yourself to memorialize,” he said. “Whereas earth burial is, you go to a cemetery and the casket is buried in the ground and you go back to visit a headstone or grave. With cremation, you can do anything.”

Over the years, Sucharski has seen people bury cremated remains and scatter them in meaningful places. However, he’s also had clients who have found unique ways to keep ashes, such as within custom jewelry or blown glass.

“Recently, people have asked us a few times to take some cremated remains and kind of sift them and just give them a little tiny bit of powder that they can take to their tattoo artist and they’ll mix a tiny portion in with their tattoo ink,” Sucharski said.

He commended any effort within the industry to ease someone’s grief.

“Our job is to help families through the death of a loved one and if we can make things a little bit easier for them in some way, then we feel that we gain gratification and we’ve done something to help our fellow man,” he said.

Seeing aging, death as ‘a normal part of life’

For Hoffman, navigating the death care industry as a newbie was an obstacle.

He attended pet expos and in-person events, where he got face-time with potential customers and confronted grief head on.

“I had a customer who wanted multiple [memorials] with the same remains,” he said. “The mother of the family had passed and there were multiple siblings that lived in different areas. So, by getting four ornaments, they can each have a unique memorial to their mother, even though they don’t live in the same area. So that was a special moment for me.”

He’s done personal hand deliveries for nearby customers who have invited him into their home to talk about the departed loved ones. The experience has taught him new lessons in humanity.

“This is an end-of-life care service and it’s individual for everyone,” he said. “I’ve had folks that need to email because they can’t talk about it. Like they get choked up every time. And I have folks that are laughing because that’s the way they cope.”

Long before Hoffman’s idea became his business, he fulfilled requests from family friends. When Diana Goldstein, 70, lost her mother Frida Beskron in 2008, she wanted to honor her memory. When Beskron was alive, she and Goldstein would attend a Friday evening happy hour.

“She always said to me, ‘When I die, I wish I could come and be at your little wine happy hours,’” Goldstein said.

Beskron was cremated and her remains were placed in an urn. In 2010, Goldstein heard that Hoffman had recently finished a ceramic memorial dedicated to his aunt. She wanted something similar, so she requested wine glasses.

“A wine glass was my mother’s personality, so it made a lot of sense to me. It was very comforting for me to see the wine glasses and I drank out of them a couple times,” she said.

An old adage in the ceramics community says that clay has a memory.

“What they mean by that is that as you work at the folds and the imprints you make, they kind of come through in the final piece of it,” Hoffman said. “That sentiment felt like the right material as well for this business.”

Hoffman said he wasn’t always comfortable with aging and death.

“I imagine that’s pretty pretty normal,” he said “But when I was in high school, I had a tumor on my sinus that was malignant and it really shook me for a long time. Working in this business has really helped me to talk about [death] more — to embrace it more as a normal part of life.”