Author: martin

Homage to Quilters

HOMAGE TO QUILTERS

21″h x 15″w x 15″d

Ceramic

My wife is a quilter, one of well over a hundred women and men belonging to the Northern New Mexico Quilting Guild.  You might think of them as a stay-at-home old fashion group of people content to sew and gossip.  Wrong.  They are an involved, aesthetically sensitive, socially minded, and diverse group of caring artists. In fact you can find organized quilting guilds in towns and cities across the country.
Earlier this year I attended the weekend gathering of 123 National Guard soldiers who recently returned from service abroad. They were being debriefed and informed about issues they would face returning home.  It was heartening to be among them as an observer.
As part of their homecoming, Guild members made a handmade personalized “Quilts of Valor” for each veteran. They were awarded as the last activity of the weekend.  To say that the soldiers were appreciative is to understate the obvious.
As I was leaving the hotel, I stopped in the washroom to ready myself for the trip home.  Two soldiers were talking.  “How was it?” one fellow asked the other. “OK. Better than I thought.” How’s that?” “It was those quilts. They made everything worthwhile.”
I didn’t say a word yet the image of those two highly tattooed muscular shaved head uniformed men cradling their quilts has stayed with me.  Their experience awakened within me a desire to pay homage to quilters.
My sculpture is highly cracked.  Following the Japanese tradition of artfully mending broken pots by filling the cracks with golden fill, I did the same.  The result was striking.  No wonder some potters were accused of breaking pots simply to enhance their value!
If you are not familiar with quilting as an art, click on the Gee’s Bend Quiltmaker’s website at www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers.  

Trigger Happy

TRIGGER HAPPY

10″w x 9″h x 8d

Ceramic and steel

 A trigger cut from a rifle, the result of Santa Fe’s gun buy-back program, lies submerged and encased in clear plastic within this cracked gun-blue bowl.  Mirroring the tradition of some native peoples, leather straps hold the broken bowl together.  A glance inside the bowl reveals something more than the brightly polished trigger.  There a nest contains three fragile robin blue eggs.

Ode to Joy

ODE TO JOY

Steel 36″h x 15″w x 15″d

Wood base 34″h x 15″w x 15″d

This steel sculpture on a wooden base is one of a triptych: “Ode to Joy (Beethoven),  “The New World Symphony” (Dvork) and “Ending On A Positive Note.”

Many say that we live in a noisy world. It is also a musical one.

Lullabies hummed during night hours introduced us to music. If fortunate enough to have hospice care as we die, music may be the last sounds we hear.  And between those times we are immersed in song.

Filmmakers and marketers know its power.  So do churches.

Then there is another kind of music.  We find it when life becomes frenetic and we need to pull apart for a time.  Off goes the internet, out come the ear buds.  It is then we hear a child breathing, rustling of leaves, the sound of a plane overhead, the wail of a coyote, the ping of a wind chime, or the creak in floor boards. It is all music when we choose to listen.

Beethoven is to my liking.  He may not be yours.  No matter.   My hope is that the sculpture awakens lightsomeness and a sense of joy.

Loss

LOSS

Ceramic, Steel Stand

22h x 12w x 13d

Yesterday the news media a reported the found body of a young woman, raped, burned and buried along a desolate trail in one of our parks.  I cannot imagine the feelings of her mother and loved ones.

In face of death, particularly of loved ones, words are of little consequence.  It is presence that is so important.

How better to express this experience than by the image of the women at the foot of the cross? They look look up at the man they loved. Their arms hang as if helpless.

My hope is that this piece is a comfort to someone who knows what it is like to experience the death of a loved one.

Burial Vessels

Burial Vessels

12″ x 6″x 6″

A loved one requested that I sculpt funeral urns for herself and her husband. I declined. How could I do that for loved ones? It seemed macabre. Then, as fortune would have it, I read Richard Dawkins’ haunting thought. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” He referred to the sobering realization that the unlucky have never been born.

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

His words left me with a lingering sense of wonder. They also freed me to work on the vessels that will at some future time hold the remains of loved ones. The pieces took months to make. What at first seemed macabre, turned into an activity that provided extended moments to reflect on the gift of loving relationships.

Boy From Aleppo

The photo of a dazed little boy from Aleppo sitting in an ambulance as a causality of war made front page news in 2016. His image is likened to the one from from the Viet Nam era when a photographer caught a naked young girl, burned and petrified, arms pleading, fleeing for her life. Who can forget that photo?

The image of the youngster from Aleppo is also difficult to forget.  I have sculpted him as a way to express the loss of innocence.  This boy has been introduced to war and its consequences.

                Boy From Aleppo

 18″ x 8″ x 9″