Buried Treasure

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Components

  • Bowl (2022) – Walnut
  • Disks (2022 to present) – Cherry, Big Leaf Maple, Red Oak, White Oak, Holly and Ebony
  • Pedestal (2022) – Cherry
  • Viewing Table (2023) – Cherry
  • Stools (2024) – Cherry, Walnut and Big Leaf Maple
  • Kashan Rug (purchased in 2024, made in Pakistan) – hand-knotted, New Zealand wool on a cotton base colored by Swiss chromium dyes, with a complex all-over floral pattern of vibrant color and sharp detail

Origin

One Saturday in Fall, 2021, my wife and I visited Penn Forest Natural Burial Park to explore our options for a green burial among the trees, shrubs and perennials in its 45 acres of forest. As I walked, I was stimulated to imagine a burial ceremony for me that would be: 

  • A beautiful ritual celebrating my life and the beginning of my dissolution into the material elements from which I was made;
  • A meaningful and satisfying experience for my deeply loved family members and friends in attendance.

How could I make it my last and best work of art? Could I do better than having each participant gently toss a handful of soil, alive with micro-organisms, on my wicker casket to get the party started?! Better to make something for each of them to toss, so that some of my work would remain with me to ease the way. This moment was the inception of Buried Treasure.

What might I make that would engage me as a woodworker and writer, my two primary artistic practices, for the rest of my life? What would require and be worth that much time and effort? The answers to these questions have become Buried Treasure.  

Buried Treasure is a special piece for me, which is why it has a page of its own. It is my first project that employs both wood and word in a substantial and integrated way. It is, in a sense, the essence and culmination of all I have made with wood and all I have aspired to write.

Buried Treasure consists of a title, five components made of wood (several hundred disks, bowl, pedestal, table, and three stools) and a plinth of a Kashan rug in all-flower pattern which was hand-tied by weavers in Pakistan.

The wood species include, among others, all of my favorites: walnut, cherry, maple and oak. Although several of the elements can be interpreted functionally as furniture (table and chairs), as a whole the ensemble is intended to evoke the aesthetic experience of engaging with a sculpture or piece of installation art.

The Disks

The disks are completed in several stages: 

  • I make the disk;
  • On one side, I laser-engrave the name, place and initial relationship/role that person has played in my life;
  • On the other side, I engrave a four-line inscription offering a portal of images to my treasured memories of that person; and
  • I finish the disk with a rubbed oil finish and wax.

Soon I will have enough disks ready for engraving that may last the rest of my life. I will continue to engrave the disks as I recall important people and memories I have forgotten, explore the meaning of our shared experience, have new experiences with family and friends, meet new people, and compose inscriptions for partially engraved disks. Only when I am unable to compose inscriptions will my work on Buried Treasure be done.

Bowl

The bowl is constructed from 177 pieces of walnut, one for each year of life gifted to my mother(91) and father(86).  The bowl holds blank, partially engraved and completed disks.

Pedestal

The cherry pedestal holds the bowl high as a revered and sacred object. It also connects the bowl with the plinth of the rug and initiates a conversation  about the disks, bowl, pedestal and rug in the engagement of the viewer.

Table

The table is used for seated viewing of the bowl and examination of the disks. Often in the morning, I place one disk on the table to bring that person more fully into my awareness for that day.

Stools

The three stools surrounding the table encourage viewers to sit and engage the sculpture together and share their experience for an extended period of time.

Rug

I have placed the entire ensemble of pieces on a carefully selected rug to enable the viewer to enter and become part of Buried Treasure and to set up a dialogue between the natural world represented in the rug and the human world represented in the wood forms.

The Viewer Engagement

While I have made Buried Treasure, in part, as an installation for self-understanding and my expression of gratitude and tribute for the people and experiences that have composed my life, I have also designed it to offer a variety of ways for viewers to engage with it, to make it a portal for their own contemplative journey. Once Buried Treasure begins to shine mirror-like in the viewer’s consciousness and the viewer’s own treasured people and memories begin to appear, the most important aspiration of the piece will be attained.