ArtStorming

ArtStorming the Art of Remembrance: Chris Moench

• Lili Pierrepont • Season 2 • Episode 4

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Dive into the transformative journey of artist Chris Moench as he shares the story behind his stunning ceramic prayer wheels. From a tragic disaster to healing and remembrance, Chris's art extends beyond aesthetics—it's a powerful medium for connection and reflection.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

SPEAKER_00:

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're going to take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming The Art of Remembrance. Today I'll be Artstorming with Chris Mensch. Known for his captivating ceramic prayer wheels, Chris's journey is a testament to the transformative power of art. I mean, talk about artful exit. In this episode, we talk about how Chris turned a tragic gas pipeline disaster into a new expression for his art form, and how the vessels he creates not only serve as stunning works of art, but also embody deep emotional and spiritual meaning. From offering comfort in hospice meditation rooms to memorializing loved ones, his work transcends mere aesthetics. It resonates deeply with the human experience. We'll also explore Chris's collaborative efforts, including a thought-provoking project aimed at environmental education with his brother, and a unique piece that he created for the Dalai Mama, highlighting the universal themes of compassion and connection. Join us on this journey of understanding and connection. I'm here today. I'm with Chris Mensch, the Mensch, and I've already declared you a Mensch because what you're doing is so extraordinary. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. And you're coming from your studio in Washington. And I see you have one of your prayer wheels behind you. And so just as a way of introduction, one of my board members, who is also a college roommate, Lucy Miller, is the reason that we got connected. And when I first invited her to come on the board and told her about this project, which she's kind of known about because it's been brewing in the background for a long time, she's like, Oh, you have to talk to my high school friend, right? Is were you guys in high school together?

SPEAKER_01:

In high school in Colorado.

SPEAKER_00:

So what a crazy thing, these old friends that connect us to new friends. So I just love that. That's our connection.

SPEAKER_01:

It's uh it it's one of those delightful surprises. And I Lucy, I know, is living way on the other side of the country from me, I think in North Carolina. And I've been an occasional just chat with her, but looking at the uh artstorming interview you did with her, I got to see some of her art, which was a delightful surprise because I didn't even know she was producing art.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, I think it's a relatively new thing. And I I got to visit her in North Carolina and see her studio, and really quite extraordinary because I've always known her to be very literary, but I never knew her to be a painter. And so I've just been tickled to see what she's up to. But anyway, this is about you. The one of the main reasons I was so excited to get you on is that uh, as you you may have heard the intro that I did, which talked about a little bit of my own backstory. Both of my parents died when I was relatively young. Neither of them had a beautiful vessel like this to go into with their cremains. That wasn't even a concept that we had until I think it was after my mother died, and I'd gone through my umpteenth memorial service with no container that was suitable for the person. That I sat down and I thought, God, why don't we have better traditions around this? And then when I saw your website, it like all clicked. Like all these like threads of ideas that I'd had 30 years ago were boom. They were right there on your website in plain sight. And obviously, you've been doing this for a while. So tell us how you got into making these extraordinary vessels.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, so I started out as a potter, just making anything I could think of out of clay and really trying to make a living at it, having had a less than exciting career as a probate assistant for an estate planning attorney for a number of years after college. And my mother looked at me one day when I was in the thick of that and said, You were so much happier doing pottery. I wish you'd get back into that because I'd learned basic pottery when I was in high school. And so, with my mother's encouragement, I threw myself into building the pottery studio and spent, and that was back in I built the studio in '93, '92 and '93, got it up and running late '93, making pots, making tiles, making wall vases, anything I could think of, crazy funny little garden sculptures selling at the farmer's market here in Bellingham, which gave me a great way to make an inway into the community and get direct reaction to my work. And then on June 10th of 1999, in Bellingham, there was just a horrible disaster. There's a gasoline petroleum transport pipeline that runs about a quarter mile from my house, 16-inch diameter thing that runs from these oil refineries that are north of Bellingham all the way to Portland, Oregon, uh, with stops along the way at the big airport in Seattle. And it was carrying gasoline one day when it ruptured right in the middle of a park in Bellingham, Watcom Falls Park. Sorry, I still get emotional when I think about the whole event. But so it spilled about a quarter million gallons of gasoline into a creek that flowed into a larger creek, Watcombe Creek, which is the river that runs from Lake Watcombe, which is the water supply for the city of Bellingham, all the way through town uh to the bay. And it covered Watcombe Creek for a mile, six inches deep in gasoline, uh, and then it ignited.

SPEAKER_00:

Whoa!

SPEAKER_01:

And uh it was right in the middle of a park, right? So that people were going there to do what people do in the park, they play and they connect with the natural world and they find solace. And the Inferno uh, well, before the the it it burst into flame, an 18-year-old boy who was the um son of a friend of mine, he had just finished his last day of high school. He was fishing in the creek and he was overcome by the fumes. Apologize again, it's hard for me to apologize. And so he he drowned in the creek. Um, and then two 10-year-old boys were burned so badly um that they died a few days later. And the whole community was completely surprised by the event. I was actually standing on the pipeline where it goes through a park that's just uh a couple of tenths of a mile from my house, and I had been crossing this cleared easement. The pipeline is buried, you know, 10 feet underground with little signs that say uh gas pipeline, but it never really, I never understood what it was. And and then I'm walking with my parents, just getting a walk in the park, and I'm looking up this cleared easement over the pipeline, and there's a 15,000-foot column one mile wide of boiling smoke. And I thought it's not the right direction for Mount Baker, which is the major volcano in the county that we live in, and it wasn't the right direction for the oil refineries. I had no idea what it was. And once I got back to my car and I turned on the radio, clearly the whole community was just in chaos and had no idea what was going on. And the pipeline had been there about 30 years, and the city had kind of grown up around it. And the pipeline company uh had not maintained the pipeline correctly. It was corroded in one place, and then and the way the rupture took place took place right is where the city's water main from Lake Watcombe crosses over the pipeline. And apparently a contractor who had been working on the water main had bumped the gas pipeline a little bit with a backhoe or something some years beforehand. So it had created a little weak spot. And then on the day that the rupture happened, there was a valve on the pipeline farther south in another county that that closed. The pipeline was full of gas, and so that sent a shockwave through the gasoline up the pipeline until it met that weak spot, and that's why it ruptured. The computer that controlled the pipeline, which was down in a suburb of Bellevue, of uh Seattle, a place called Bellevue, um, sensed that there was a drop in the pressure and it shut the pipeline down, and then the human operator overrode the computer and turned it back on. So just a whole story of mishaps and mistakes and negligences that people people did, and nobody really thinking about what the potential consequences were, which is which is one of the things I think to be drawn out of that disaster. And I and I felt that I was afraid that this story of the pipeline disaster, and which really to me served as a perfect metaphor for the kind of global house of cards that we've constructed with our dependence on fossil fuels. Um I was afraid the story would just be forgotten about and we would just proceed on as though nothing had happened. Um, once the pipeline was patched and carrying gasoline again, people would just go on with their lives, except, of course, the parents of the children who died. And so I wanted to make something that would tell that story and that would give people a way of contributing their own reflections and uh hopefully be a part of a collective community response to trying to address a basic illness in our society, which is our dependent on fossil fuels. And so I spent about six months just within that in my consciousness, just kind of looking for a form to do it. And I was at another potter's house one night, and we were just looking at photographs of ancient clay work from all over the world. And one of the images that popped up was a pre-Columbian Mayan sculpture, just a simple cylinder with an illustration carved around the outside, and it was just like, oh, there it is. Put it on a turntable, and people can turn it in order to read the story, and it physically engages them. And as a vessel, it can receive people's written responses, thoughts, hopes. I didn't think of it as a prayer wheel at the time. Um, and I know that a lot of people see my work and they say, ah, and sometimes sometimes people say, Oh, those are Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels. I'm not Tibetan, I'm not Buddhist. Um, and these are fundamentally different from the Buddhist prayer wheels because the Buddhists fill their prayer wheels with repetitions of their mantras, as many as they can get, and the outside has written in script the same prayers. And um, so they're not those kind of traditional prayer wheels, but there's certainly similarity between the two. What I feel people are putting inside are the things, you know, stories of ideas, hopes, dreams that they care about. And whether that's the ashes of a loved one, and then maybe some tokens of memories with those people, um, that's great. I don't, it's not prescriptive to me. My work is an invitation.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, the fact that it's a vessel is beautiful. I mean, a vessel is by nature an invitation to add to it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And uh and I and I get, and at this point, I've been doing the first one I made was in 2000. So I've been doing it 25 years. Um I've made something like 2,000 of them.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01:

Um and some of them are commission pieces, very specific about, you know, I do quite a number of urns that have imagery that depicts meaningful things in the uh deceased person's life, similar to sort of what you were talking about with your parents. Um, might have been appropriate. And sometimes, like the ones I have here are simply ones out of my own inspiration. I try to create kind of a narrative flow in the imagery, which is makes it more of an invitation to engage with the piece. Um, and they celebrate things that inspire me. They're oftentimes metaphoric for my own struggle to find meaning in life. Um, this particular one is just sandhill cranes flying over Mount Hood in Oregon, and and you can see uh Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens in the background, and I just call it uh the higher path.

SPEAKER_00:

Um so beautiful. And uh it just takes a slight turn and it keeps going for a little while. So with the mechanism that allows it to just turn on its axis and thus the name Yeah, they're they're bolted to the to the turntable so people can feel secure in turning them.

SPEAKER_01:

Um and uh one can read all kinds of meaning into every every element, and that's one of the things I have really enjoyed with committing myself to a particular form and exploring it. And you have the shape of the vessel, you have the colors of the vessel, you have the illustration itself, you have the shape of the top, the handle, um, the direction of the spin. Um and whether or not the illustration goes with the direction of the spin, or in some way is in you know, swimming upstream, I guess is one way to think about it. And then, of course, there's everything that people put in. And and to me, it's art is fundamentally a collaborative process, at least art that you want people to respond to, because they're responding to it out of things that are within them and within their experience. And um it's meaningful because of what they bring to it. So I like that I create these vessels and then they go out and they have a larger life.

SPEAKER_00:

So, how are people learning of this exist? I mean, obviously, you're well known in your neighborhood, in your universe, but I can't believe this hasn't caught on like wildfire, no pun intended. But it just seems like such a no-brainer. And I would think every funeral service enterprise in the United States would want to commission you or have you on their team to commission these for anybody.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I have relationships with some um funeral providers, and uh word of mouth has been huge. I I do arts festivals or fairs every once in a while. I've had a number of things that that sort of gave me a little higher profile, but I haven't really sought them out. Most of them have come to me. Um, and I'm it's like just me in the studio.

SPEAKER_00:

So it's definitely one-of-a-kind objects. I mean, they are art pieces. This is not a production situation.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and they're definitely higher end because it takes me a lot of time, the piece.

SPEAKER_00:

But I just love that the fact that not only are they multi-purpose and have so many depths of use and meaning, but they are such incredible conversation starters. And for me, and for my purposes, for what we're trying to achieve with this whole podcast and our whole season, is to get people more engaged in a conversation. And I can't think of a better conversation starter than one of your pieces. I mean, they're just exquisite.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you. I really put my heart into them and in so many ways. And my engagement with it has ebbed and flowed over the years. It's a discipline, it's a practice. Every time that I've come to a place where I've said, yeah, maybe I've made enough. I'm just overwhelmed, or I won't I I think what I want to do is is uh, I don't know, get a job as a school bus driver. Um there's a voice in the back of my head that just says, stick with it. And I commit my, I recommit myself to it. And I and I don't have much interest in other forms. It feels to me that this is just infinite. And the more I concentrate on it, um, the more I am challenged to bring out things within myself. I'm challenged by the the ceramic process itself. And and one of the things I love about the ceramic process, and also I'm incredibly frustrated by, is that I have really limited control. I have the knowledge, the experience that I bring to it, and technical manual manuals and you know, some knowledge of glaze chemistry and that sort of thing. But this is they're made of material from the earth, which the chemistry of it can change from one foot to the next in the given place that it's dug up. And that chemistry influences how it behaves in the kiln, how it interacts with the chemistry of the glazes and that sort of thing that can affect color. And more times than I can count, I pull a piece out of the kiln now and it's really badly cracked or it's blistered. And it's all because of something I don't understand about the nature of the material or what I'm doing in the firing process. And I've been at this a long time.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, what another incredible layer to the whole process, as you just said, when when you want to give up the um unpredictability of the materials is so much a metaphor for the unpredictability of life and for this whole process. And one of the other questions that jumps to mind is that I can see how when you're engaging with something that's this profound and this deep that you would get to a sort of saturation where you think, can I do yet another one? But it seems to me that it's more life-giving than life depleting at the end of the day that you keep coming back.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I get a wonderful amount of praise for it, and that feeds me, certainly. I get stories from people who have run into my work at really difficult points in their lives. I got a note from a woman um a couple of weeks ago whose children, she had two young children, and that she said they had been kidnapped from her. Didn't go into details. I assume it was some kind of domestic situation. Maybe her ex-partner had taken the kids. Um, but for her, it was really devastating. And she was lost for a while and then got a job as a nurse, a night nurse in a hospice. And that hospice happened to have one of my prayer wheels in their meditation room. And she said that she would, you know, it's quiet in the hospice late at night. There's not a lot happening most of the time. So every night she would go into the meditation room and just sit with the prayer wheel and turn it and write out the things that she was feeling, the things that she was hoping for, her anger, whatever, it all went into the prayer wheel. And she just was sending me this note out of gratitude for making it and having it there. And uh, she ultimately got her kids back, was reunited with them, and and um, I think is is through that trauma as much as anyone can be. Um but I hear stories like that. And and then sometimes, like I have out on the San Juan Islands to the west of here in the the Salish Sea, there's this wonderful sculpture park called this San Juan Islands Sculpture Park. And I have three vessels about this size installed in the sculpture park, and the people who run the park have a little wooden box with a lid on it and the and writing materials in the box. And they've been out there for probably 15 years, the prayer wheels in the park. And they every year get filled right to the top with things that people write. And so I have to go clean them out. I get these big bags full of people's prayers that we've now have taken to burning on the solstice just because we need to do something with them. Um, and we read a few, and some of them are very general, peace on earth kinds of things. Some of them are very, you know, I hope Bill Gates gives me a billion dollars written in a child script. Some of them are lengthy letters talking about very personal uh hopes and traumas. So they really get a lot of use. And to me, that's just it's the deeply affirming of how I want my work to be in community. And to to me, they're an invitation for people to reflect on the things they care about and to try to to live by those um those ideas and to cut down on some of the noise of society, which gives us lots of anxiety and I think oftentimes uh diverts us from the things that we really care about.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And the opportunity for creating ritual. I mean, it's one thing that's really missing from our culture. We just don't have enough rituals like this. And and these invite an opportunity to engage in ritual. And I love that they can be given at somebody's birthday, even a bar mitzvah gift or any a gift at any stage of life that's a kind of a life path where you start to kind of declare that you are this vessel that is going through life and that things that you put into it are sacred. And so it makes us be much more conscious. And I love this idea of consciously creating our legacy, our living legacy as we live now. Not so much the name that goes on the building, you know, but like how are we going to proceed through life and what an incredible legacy you've created for yourself and for so many people who, up to before they had one of your vessels, didn't have a way to think of their legacy as this container of their life contained. I just think it's so cool.

SPEAKER_01:

You're understanding them, at least as far as my intent very well. And I appreciate that enormously. Um thinking about those cracks I was talking about in the wheels when they come out of the kiln. What I do now is I I fill them with a putty or epoxy and I put gold leaf on them.

SPEAKER_00:

Kitsugi, kitsugi, which is the Japanese technique, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and to me, they're a metaphor for the traumas that anyone experiences in life. It's really how you treat the trauma. You can't avoid the trauma, it'll get you. But if you can look at it and say, well, this makes me a fuller person in some way, and in some way it's a beautiful thing. Um that's what we have to do to continue and to to grow and find find richness in every experience.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So before this tragic accident in your neighborhood, had you had own your own personal traumas around death, or uh did would was this the thing that instigated it?

SPEAKER_01:

That was the I mean, that was the watershed event that really set me on the path of the prayer wheels. Yeah, actually, no, I mean I had friends of my age die in accidental death or by their own hand. I hadn't really reflected on that before. Certainly I would have appreciated a having a prayer wheel previously. Um but it was the pipeline disaster which really sort of kicked me in the butt to find some way of responding in a in a way that really affected the way I live and how I live in the world. And uh so I'm appreciative of that element of it.

SPEAKER_00:

So I'm curious about when you engage in a commission, what kind of dialogue happens between you and the family members that that instigate the commission?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it it varies. And particularly when someone is commissioning something from me, uh my goal is not as an artist, I'm I really almost see myself as a technician. I mean, I have certain sort of design sensibilities that I bring to it, but what I want to do is create a piece that resonates for them, that is going to become their sanctuary. Um and so if somebody wants me to put their cat on it, and I don't have particular affection for cats, um, I will do that, no problem. And I will make it the best cat I can make it, because the cat is what's important to them. There are occasions people commission something from me, and they'll like there's a healer that I know through other engagements in the world, and she came to me one day and she said, Well, you know me. I want you to make me a prayer wheel. And so I got to do anything I wanted with the idea uh with what my concept of her was. And I did uh what I thought of as a beautiful piece, and she loves it. She uses it in her practice all the time. Um, so that's what I mean. It varies. There people give me more or less latitude. So I'm really glad that my work is both pieces just out of my own inspiration and commission pieces, because I commission pieces can be very time consuming. They require me to do oftentimes detailed drawings, uh laying out the piece and all the various icons. Someone will come to me and they say, I want you to do one about my husband who I lived with for 50 years and he just died, and he loved to fish and he loved this boat, and he loved to travel in their camper, and and all this, these different things that were iconic for them, um for the woman who was commissioning it. And she gave me a whole lot of photos, so I create kind of a collage, uh, a narrative collage that will wrap around the vessel and um it will speak to her of her life with her husband. And she can fill it with, she can put his actually. I think in that case, which I'm still working on that piece, I think I'm actually going to fire some of his cremains on the uh which I've done a number of times. Um when my mother had leukemia and she knew that she was uh on the path to death. Um, she was she lived in Colorado and she came up for Thanksgiving and she picked a piece just out of my general inventory and said, okay, I want that one. And then before she died, we had uh what we ended up calling an awake, because she was still alive. And she had organized it, she spent the last several months of her life creating this event that drew people from as far away as the Czech Republic in Hawaii to Boulder, Colorado for several days of celebrating her life. And um we had the prayer wheel there where people could write nice things about her stories, what have you. And then after she she died just a few days after her awake. Um and we initially put her cremated remains into that vessel along with all the things that people had written, and then we spread them in various places that she loved. And but we st my brother still has the vessel and the prayer wheel and the uh and the things that people wrote. Um so that was you know very personal for me use.

SPEAKER_00:

Of course. And so was the awake, I love the play on wake awake. Um, was that her idea or your idea, or is that is that a thing?

SPEAKER_01:

It was, I mean, what happened was she was out to dinner with my brother and sister in law and my dad one evening, and she had received this diagnosis. She was getting Transfusions which gave her energy that would last for a few weeks and then dissipate, and then she'd get another transfusion, but they gradually became less and less effective. Anyway, she was at dinner and she mused that she was going to be sad not to hear what everybody had to say about her at her memorial. And she was very much a person who was about building connections with people. She was a teacher, actually. She actually was a teacher in the school that Lucy and I went to. Um and Lucy knows her or knew her uh pretty well. And so uh the my my brother or my dad, I don't remember who said, Well, why don't we do it before you die? And uh so that's what set it off.

SPEAKER_00:

Um so great. So great. That was another idea that came to me 30 years ago when I was so this whole this whole project emerged, you know, years and years and years ago, and then it and it got getting shelved and then it resurrected. But you're reminding me of so many of the ideas that percolated up in there. There was this decade where I literally, like at least once a year, was in charge of doing something for somebody who had died. And you know, you start to get all these different ideas that popcorn out, and that was way before the computers and in you know, any way to capture the idea. So I had a shoebox full of ideas and clippings from newspapers that I had seen along the way. And and um, I went back and looked at it recently, and it was pretty paltry relative to what it seemed like 10 years worth of stuff. I've I've hence, you know, collected even more information. But again, the reason I'm doing this is that we get caught off guard, right? And so if we can give it a little bit of forethought, you know, there's so many creative things that we can do that are much more worthy of the lives that we are leading and being much more intentional about it, right? So I think that should be another tradition. And we're gonna make sure that we probably put that in our episode notes that that you might people might want to consider having an awake. I just think that's just the great idea.

SPEAKER_01:

My mother had great advantage in that she knew she had, you know, she had all this lead up time, but there was a definite, not an end date, but she knew these were the she knew it was gonna be like four months, and then it was gonna be over. And and the timing worked out amazing, really.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Christmas time, I think her awake was on the 27th of December. We all gathered in Boulder, had this incredible event, and then I came home to Bellingham, and my sister went back to her place in Portland, and then I think it was uh January 5th. My mom got came got pneumonia and went into the hospital. And and my brother and dad said, Well, you guys better come back now. It's this is gonna be the the end. And so I got to spend another few hours with her, and then and then she just she took her oxygen cannula out and was dead in half an hour.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. But I have to say, I guess you have nothing to compare it to because you know, you've only you only you lose a mother once. But having had the experience of the awake before, and then more time before she actually passed to see her that one last time, it had to make the grieving process, or I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth. Do you feel like that maybe alleviated some of the pain of her passing?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I mean, you know, it's very, very personal. And inevitably, I think there are things that come up after the death that you think, oh, I just really would have loved to have said that to her or asked her this question. Um and that's you know, I I she knew I loved her.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. I I just think that again, the prayer wheels are such a beautiful thing for that because I can I can only imagine in the 30 some years that have passed since both my 30 and 40, that um it would have been so cool to have a place, even if it was symbolic, that I could ask that question 20 years later, regardless of what one's beliefs are, the ritual of doing something like that, that maybe the answer comes to you, or just that you get to actually ask the question in a way that is ritualized so that it feels captured by something. And I just love that the vessel can do that, you know, or just something that you wish that you had said, and it goes into the vessel. I have another artist that I'll be interviewing on the show who makes these beautiful vessels. He works in wood, he works in a lot of different media. His name is Daniel Wheeler. I don't know if you've come across him, but he made this one beautiful um five petal lotus, uh carved lotus. And each of the petals went to one of the children so that they each had a piece of the original artwork, and each petal is a beautiful vessel in its own right, and they kind of all screwed to this stamen, which was also a part of the vessel. It's just absolutely gorgeous. And um, but I I love too that even if there isn't a central place that you can go and add the question that everybody has their own little compartmentalized version of something, I just think it's extraordinary. And I don't know if I mentioned it, but one of the things that we're planning to do along with this podcast series is an exhibition. We're doing a virtual art exhibition. It was originally going to be an actual exhibition that started in Santa Fe and then migrated to Minneapolis and then uh Brooklyn and North Carolina where Lucy is. And it is going to be an exhibition of memorial arts objects like yours. And the advantage of doing this as a virtual exhibition is that we will be able to take an image of your prayer wheel, maybe even one of the videos, and then people can walk into the virtual gallery and walk around your vessels, and then there will be information that uh tags it to your website and further information and all that. So I'm hoping you would be willing to participate in that uh exhibition for us. And um, to your point about the uh the sculpture park in Washington, another concept that I have that is gonna be unveiled at this exhibition is something called Dream Fields. And we're proposing a new type of memorial arts park, which would be like a sculpture park meets a cemetery with green burials and things like this. What we're gonna do is we're rewilding golf courses to do that. So it's a fun concept in the sense that the the infrastructure is is there already. You've got the ADA compliant, everything, and then the golf house becomes a a uh a reception hall for either services, art presentations, the grounds can become available for art presentations, and the whole thing becomes a community arts sort of festival ongoing.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And I'd love to have some of your prayer wheels there too.

SPEAKER_01:

Where is that gonna be?

SPEAKER_00:

Is that gonna be in the Santa Fe area or do you know we're we're looking at locations to do the pilot project, but there are golf courses for sale all over the place because they're expensive to maintain. And I don't know if there's enough of a demand for the certain places, have more demand, obviously, for golf courses. I guess they're still being built, but there are a lot of defunct golf courses, and it's a great way to re-green the space and keep it available so that it's not turned into a shopping mall or whatever. So we're we're playing with this idea and still unfolding it. But when you mentioned the um sculpture park, that I definitely would love to see. I have what's the biggest one you've ever done? I can see them being like the big Tibetan prayer wheels, you know, huge.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the best one I've done was a total of about four feet tall. Um, and it's installed in the graduate library at the University of Washington. Um it was uh, and I I have it on my website. Um, it was a piece that I'd made uh out of a request from a group that was organizing this. Actually, I've got it on my teacher here now. I think about the Seeds of Compassion Gathering, which was the Dalai Lama and his organization came to Seattle and gathered spiritual leaders and teachers and psychologists from all across the world, really, to get together and have a dialogue about how people learn compassionate behavior, including and particularly children, and how compassionate behavior is taught. And I was showing my work at an arts festival in Bellevue down in the Seattle area. I guess that festival takes place in late July, and I had a booth full of prayer wheels, and a woman came into the to the booth and said, Hey, I wonder if you'd be willing to make a prayer wheel for the Seeds of Compassion gathering. And I had not heard of it. And before I knew it, I was involved in making this huge vessel that I designed in collaboration with um the Dalai Lama's representative in this country, uh Tenzin Dondan. And uh, and then I got to make a smaller piece that served as a as a gift from the organizers to the Dalai Lama that went back to uh his home in Dharmsala. Um But anyway, that was that was the biggest one I'd made. Big pieces are challenging. This is this is more sort of on the size that I'm comfortable making. Partly it's a limitation of my the size of my kiln. Um and then the limitation of the materials. Um oftentimes big big pieces, particularly when they're as they're drying and shrinking, they can develop cracks. And then just any kind of transport, and you have this big dry clay structure, it's just very fragile. Um so I'm I'm comfortable with that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Well, the size that you have there is is is probably the most uh useful for the average person.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, I think um most of the ones I make for for general uh you know, for people's homes, they they like them to be portable. I think that's one of the things that resonates for people in these times where people are so transient and moving all the time. They want something that they can fit in a small apartment. Um and that they it's not gonna be a huge problem if they have to move across the country.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_01:

So I I'd say the majority of my work is you know nine inches in diameter and 10 to 12 inches tall. Um but you can do a lot with a small piece. Oh, I bet.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I mean, just the fact that it's there, it's a talisman, the fact that it just spins and you touch it and it just begs to be interacted with, right? I want one. I don't know which one I'm gonna get yet or whether I'm gonna commission one, but I definitely want one.

SPEAKER_01:

That would be an honor.

SPEAKER_00:

Man, it's they're just so beautiful.

SPEAKER_01:

As I as I like to say, it's uh what am I doing these days? I'm I'm spinning my wheels productively.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, so I'm curious, what did what the one that you did for the Dalai Lama, like what how did you decide what to do on the one that was the personal gift, not the not the So that one I adapted a traditional Tibetan Buddhist illustration to the vessel.

SPEAKER_01:

There's a I have a book that's all about Tibetan Buddhist iconography and illustration, and there's one that is a pathway that winds up and along the pathway is a monk and an elephant, and then various other animals. But the monk's relation to the elephant is the elephant is the mind symbolically. And so the monk is going up this pathway and his relationship to the elephant changes. So at the beginning, he's sort of trailing along behind the elephant, holding on to its tail, and then eventually he's kind of walking with the elephant, then leading the elephant, and then riding the elephant. And then, if memory serves, the elephant disappears entirely, and the monk is just sitting in in uh contemplation. Um, so I just wrapped that pathway around the vessel. It was pretty simple, but I thought I should do something that you know spoke directly to the Dalai Lama's particular uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm just I'm so impressed that you've landed on something. Your mind must have been spinning, literally, trying to decide what to do for the Dalai Lama.

SPEAKER_01:

It was, I mean, that was 2008. So it my memory of the whole process is dim at this point. I remember developing the design for the larger vessel, which was much more rooted in place in the Pacific Northwest. It had Mount Rainier on it and a big big leaf maple tree. And it was really inspired out of the name the seeds of compassion. So the big leaf maple tree is dropping the maple samaras, which are spinning down, and then children are catching the samaras and they plant them, and then this as the vessel spins, this the tree sprouts and grows into a tree, and the children are all dancing around the tree.

SPEAKER_00:

What a beautiful image.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I don't know how much spinning it gets in the in the graduate library anymore. I don't think a lot of children go in there and and spin it.

SPEAKER_00:

And yeah, they probably don't want a lot of hands on it anyway.

SPEAKER_01:

It's available, and I had a a friend of mine who is a really good wood turner turn the lid itself in that sculpture park on San Juan Island. I have ceramic lids on all the vessels, and people can lift them off. And occasionally I have to make a new lid. Yeah, but that's I'm happy that they're lifting them off. And and I think the other the other thing I like about ceramics for the prayer wheels is that the fragility and the interaction is there's a tension there. People are afraid of hurting things, right? It's uh but you pay closer attention. It's like drinking wine out of a fine goblet. You pay more attention to the wine because you recognize the fragility of the goblet. And um so I while I've cut cast one piece in bronze, I'm really happy working in ceramics.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so that would be you you're not gonna do more in bronze. I mean, it does lend itself to bronze. And aren't the Tibetan prayer wheels often bronze?

SPEAKER_01:

They are, yeah. Right. And actually, I have seen ceramic prayer wheels in the with Tibetan script on the outside, and I think they're actually filled with the with the um prayers, um, the traditional Tibetan prayers, but it's not a regular occurrence, and I think that was probably an American artist that did it. Um I'm I'm happy with the fragility. I mean, we're all we're all fragile. The world is a fragile place.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and your your brother, if I'm not mistaken, I think Lucy said something about your brother and you have done a collaboration uh to um use the prayer wheels as a vehicle for teaching about the fragility of the earth. Can you say a little bit more about that project?

SPEAKER_01:

That was a project that my my brother, who has done all kinds of um international environmental study and policy development, working for things like the government of India and various states within India and Cambodia and Vietnam and that sort of thing. He had founded this institute called the Institute Social and Environmental Transition. And he got the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a project called the Resilience Narratives. And part of that was for me to create three large prayer wheels that depicted humanity's relationship with um with water and with the planet as a whole. Um, and I can share, I think I shared one photo of one of those wheels, and I can share photos of the other two as well if you like. Um but the outside had it had a tree, and and the tree trunk broke into branches, and then these the continental masses, the the the vessels are sort of round, and the continental masses are um leaf clusters on the trees, basically. And then those, and then on top of that, and on the oceans are imposed all kinds of depictions, detailed imagery of humanity's relationship with the planet, things that are farming and oil drilling and shipping and on and on and on. I just fill it up. They're very busy uh visually graphics, but they're the planet, and so they spin as the planet. Um and we took those first to New York to meet with the Rockefeller Foundation and show them what we had created, and then we went to um a conference in St. Louis about uh resilience that drew people from all over the country who were in mostly government employees and probably contractor employees who are working on building resilient infrastructure and policymakers. And so we had the pieces there for people to write their thoughts and hopes on and put them into the wheels. And then we went to uh a week-long event in Stockholm called World Water Week that drew people from all over the world who are working on water issues all over the world, which are um uh in many places very dire. And uh we did a presentation with the wheels there and we had kind of a booth explaining them. And then ultimately the wheels ended up in the Waterman's Museum in Yorktown, Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay. And I, to be honest, don't know how much they're utilizing them there yet. I I would I something in me says, I really would like to have those back and see what I can do with them. Um, because they I think they were had potential to be in, you know, if installed in the right location, to be pretty powerful teaching tools and tools for reflection. I would love to have a prayer wheel and the entryway to the city hall where people are making decisions for the welfare of the community, or you know, at the state legislature building, where it's just this call to to the people who are there to make decisions to say, hey, remember why you're here.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. This is what incredible way to uh engage community and and feel a connection. I mean, again, it's just one of those, just like putting that question to your parent from 30 years ago that you didn't get to ask. It it's a real way to feel like you're putting your word and your ideas out there in into something where it's going to be contained and it's gonna be appreciated and it's gonna be noted. I think it's just we have a tradition here in Santa Fe called Zozobra that happens once a year. We just had our hundredth anniversary, and it's a tradition every year. So they they build this huge effigy to old man gloom, and then they ignite him and they send him up in flames. But prior to his well, what an incredible thing that you are doing. What a legacy you're creating for yourself and giving us the opportunity to think about legacy for ourselves. You were just like the most perfect guest I could have hoped for this early in the season. So tell our listeners again, it's accessofope.net.

SPEAKER_01:

As in as in as in the you know, we're all connected.

SPEAKER_00:

That's even better. Even better. So thank you so, so much.

SPEAKER_01:

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for interviewing me. For me, it's always an adventure into my own intent and purposes, and I appreciate having conversation because it makes me think more deeply about what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Chris. You are a mensch, for sure. So thanks for joining us today. Artstorming is brought to you and supported by Artbridge NM and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms or wherever you listen. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares help us to reach more listeners and attract the support we need to thrive in these challenging times. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. We rely on your help to keep these conversations going. Every dollar you contribute goes directly into programs that support our mission. And we've been offered a matching grant that will match every dollar that you contribute. That means more compelling stories, more in depth articles, and an even greater impact on our community. Please visit our website at www.artbridgenm.org and thank you so much for being an essential part of our work.

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Lili Pierrepont

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