The Ashtray and its Urn

Designer: Pia HINZ 

Bio of the designer: Pia Hinz (b. 1991, Dortmund, Germany) is an artist based in the south of France. She graduated from the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré in Paris in 2011, before studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she graduated in 2018.

Her practice explores colour, material, light, and space through site-specific installations and stained-glass works. Since discovering stained glass in 2022, the medium has become central to her practice. She now creates works that enter into dialogue with unexpected architectural and spatial environments.

title:The Ashtray and its Urn

short description:The Ashtray and Its Urn is a pair of stained-glass objects that explore the relationship between smoking, ritual, and mortality. Although different in scale and purpose, the two objects share the same material, colours and the same gesture: they both receive what remains after burning.

The ashtray and the urn form a humorous yet unsettling dialogue. The cigarette, an ordinary object associated with pleasure, habit, and addiction, becomes the first step in a journey towards the beyond. The ashtray therefore becomes a miniature prefiguration of the urn — a mundane object quietly anticipating its monumental counterpart.

The urn acts almost like an Arabesque lighthouse, a strange and ceremonial beacon pointing towards the possible destination of the heavy smoker. It offers a darkly comic vision of an eternal return.What begins as a daily ritual ends as a final one.

The objets create an absurd contrast: a cigarette ashtray is treated with the visual language of a reliquary, while an urn becomes its enlarged, inevitable companion.

The Ashtray and Its Urn moves between the useful and the ceremonial, the comic and the macabre, transforming a familiar smoking ritual into a reflection on mortality.

materials used: Stained-glass

measurements:Ashtray: 13cmx8cmx8cm Urn: 39cmx12cmx12cm

selling price: 540 €