Ovens of Transformation (A Studio Story)

When I returned from Nova Scotia some years ago, I felt pulled toward an unlikely place, Bread and Puppet in rural Vermont. Something about it lodged in me. Maybe it was the smoke and fire, the raw theatre of protest, or the puppets moving through fields like myths with legs. Or maybe it was the bread itself; it was dark, crusty, honest. Handed out without ceremony, still warm from the oven. That kind of bread doesn’t pretend. It’s made from time, labour, and wild yeast. When it crackles as you tear it open, it feels like truth.

That bread led me to another obsession: wood-fired ovens, the architecture of patience and heat. I spent time researching them in the Vallée-du-Saint-Laurent, south of Québec City. There, the craft is exact: the oven door must be precisely two-thirds the height of the dome to draw properly and hold heat. These weren’t just ovens, they were slow-built vessels of wisdom, passed from hand to hand. They were more than tools. They were crucibles of transformation.

I found stories, too…old folktales of naughty children who climb into ovens and come out the other side as birds. Strange, yes, but somehow it makes sense. The oven as crucible. The child as something raw. The fire as the thing that changes them and helps them to fly.

When I returned from Bread and Puppet, I was also returning home to Shawville, the land of my maternal ancestors. I was rebuilding my life there, slowly, with my hands. Over those next few years, I built a treehouse. I built a bread oven. Both were acts of grounding and healing. Of working with wood, earth, and fire to make something sturdy and sincere. Of starting again.

And now, once again, I’m building.

This time, it’s a ramshackled old shed behind our house; a house we’ve only just begun to call home after moving in last year. A fresh start. A new life. After ten years running a bicycle shop, I’ve turned back to painting full-time, and this shed is becoming my summer studio.

Still, it’s a space of heat and potential. An atelier. A place of becoming.

I don’t know exactly where it’s going, only that the impulse is the same: to build something honest, to step into the warmth, and to emerge changed.

-Peter