Avian Reliquary

​"Avian Reliquary" - bone and burl wood, 19" x 17" x 2".  Ready to hang.  Inquiries: [email protected]

"If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven†no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory."-- Daniel Taylor

This piece almost became a painting.

But the burl, once sanded, was silky and exquisitely patterned, the bark dark and moody.  And two people who happened to be former archeologist-types said "oh no you don't, Lola!"   Sometimes I am wise enough to listen.

This small seabird, found in a sand dune on a long spit near Tillamook Bay, decided she wanted to be on display in a big way.

Avian Reliquary

Instead of charcoal and brushes and paper towels, water and paint, there was sandpaper, a Dremel, more sandpaper, olive oil, a torn paper bag (for buffing) and a new-to-me glue called PaleoBond.  Along with a lot of studying of fossil images to see how this little one might have been splayed if she had been fossilized.  It's an incomplete skeleton, and the bones have been arranged largely to suit my sense of composition, so they are likely all in the wrong places.  And it is an unnerving, daunting task to take two rare things (a beautiful burl and a precious skeleton) and then do stuff to them.  Oy!  But it seems, in the end, a relic-worthy setting for a bird long lost in the sand.