The Creative Process
I traveled literally half way around the world and hiked two days into the Kumbu Valley to find a medium for my art, oxygen cylinders recovered from Mount Everest. With the help of a mountaineering organization in Katmandu we found and organized the purchase, transportation and shipping of 132 oxygen cylinders to the US. I then agonized over how long it took for the cylinders to finally reach my shop in Maine. The adventure of getting them through customs is another story.
I succeeded in reaching my goal and finally get to start creating the bells and bowls I imagined while watching that National Geographic about Mount Everest and these oxygen cylinders.
Here I am grinding away years of wear and tear from 100 mph winds, avalanches, and sub-zero temperatures. You can see the bell starts to emerging.
Each bell or bowl is hand carved on a wood working lathe. I create unique bells and bowls that sound as good as they look. Having developed techniques where woodturning tools are used on the cylinders to cut the grooves, beads, and undulations. Each piece starts with a customer selecting a style of bell or bowl and then I create a unique piece just for that person. I try to imagine the mountaineer who carried this cylinder to the top of the world. The struggle it took to get there and then the years it spent basking in the Nepalese sun one moment then freezing in the dark Everest nights the next.
The end result is a complete transformation of what was once used and abandoned into what is now beautiful and inspiring art.
The Everest Ornament
We noticed all these shaving coming off my lathe during the making of the bells and bowls. They started to fill up my shop floor and started to become a problem. We couldn't throw them away because we pulled them out of a landfill in Nepal. We couldn't put them back in a landfill in Brunswick, Maine so we had to use our imaginations again to figure out what to do with them.
We came up with these really nice little Christmas ornaments. They ended up becoming the heart and soul of our business. They represent the three r's of reduce, reuse, and recycle. A small but significant message we try to follow thru all of our business.
We pack The Everest Ornaments in these nice recycled paper boxes and only use vegetable based ink in our printing.
Click on picture to purchase an ornament!