Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth".
                                                                          -- Byrd Gibbens, Professor of English at University of Arkansas, Little Rock



...Check downtown Seattle on 6th Avenue and you'll find that my poor old coyote, salvaged from a bone pit on state land here in the Methow Valley, is having his fifteen minutes...Nordstrom's chose my piece, Reliquary for a Trickster, to be featured in their window alongside the work of several other glass artists. It's all to promote the Pilchuck Auction, which will be held at the Westin Hotel.  There will be an exhibition the day before the auction to preview the work as well! I'm really excited; Pilchuck is a truly unique place in the world, and has been key to my latest body of work by giving me access to studio space, equipment, and a community of creative, extremely adept glassworkers from all over the world to bounce ideas and inspiration off of. I feel really honored to give back. 
            I want to talk about that piece a little bit - it's actually a really important piece for me, in that it was the synthesis of a lot of ideas I had been thinking about for a long time.  The impetus behind it was actually a course I took in college on Jungian archetypes, and in particular the Trickster archetype...so we looked at that in traditions around the world, including Africa, Haiti, various Native American traditions...I think Hermes made an appearance, as did PeeWee Herman. Seriously! 
 
                    So Tricksters have become important to me , Raven (the whole Corvid family actually, including magpies and crows) anc Coyote in particular. They're part of my daily environment, and are fascinating to spend any amount of time with...why? I suppose one reason certain animals take on a certain interest is just more human navel-gazing - there are qualities they embody that remind us of ourselves.  The book "In the Company of Crows and Ravens" by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell is highly recommended...I probably have a few others I could think of. 
    
                    

I grew up in the full-on pageantry of a Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox Catholic background, and so the aesthetics of ceremony and the sacred are something that seems to be programmed into my artistic DNA...  the incense, the foreign languages, the mysterious golden boxes and candles and symbols, all tied to these issues of transformation, the transmutation of the material body...heady stuff for a little kid. And it's a place I find myself continuing to return to as an artist, rich ground I continue to turn over, even though in many cases the substance behind those beliefs mean much less to me now. 

         Those golden shrines, mysterious and always locked, often containing an actual relic or material embodiment of the divine, captured my imagination...made all those stories and myths lock down into an object that could be held and turned over, proof that magic still happened in the material world...As I began to study glassworking, reliquaries kept returning into my work, sometimes in the form of belljars or scientific apparatus. Really, in some ways, I'm still not sure I see the distinction between those worlds, of science and faith.  The ceremony and trappings behind both of those worlds remains a major source of my inspiration and work.
 
Trickster was conceived as a piece with a foot in both those worlds..."between-ness" being a state that comes very naturally to tricksters. The main body of the piece was based off of antique diving bells...(wooof, that could be a post in its own right...the short story is that the diving helmet represents: technology as a vehicle of transgression, ultimate isolation, ultimate protection, ultimate immobilization in the name of all three of these things. Oh yeah? :)  The neck of the piece was a series of carefully polished golden lenses...mirroring the gilded spine inside the helmet bit...the top lens has a tiny golden mouse skull attached (got that one from an owl pellet, incidentally)...The gilded quality, as well as the tongue-in-cheek addition of the belly-dancer bells and the brass peacock fan...well, let's just say Trickster likes shiny things, and loves laughter. :)

Rob and I found the coyote skeleton...actually two of them...a few years ago on a bike trip. I like coyotes, although most people really don't seem to feel the same. The name "coyote" is borrowed  from Mexican Spanish, ultimately derived from the  Nahuatl word cóyotl. Its scientific name, Canis latrans, means "barking dog." The full range of their vocalizations is astounding, and I stay awake often listening to their percussive yips and yelps. Their howls sound mad to me, so eerie on a night like last night, where the wind blew my curtains in through the window, and lightning silently lit shadows across the floor. 
          A lot of  folks just shoot them if they see them hanging around; they're a major livestock nuisance, although Rob and I haven't really had any problems, even though they do come quite close to the house. When we moved our chickens to a new house, we found coyote footprints investigating the old house, which of course smelled of chickens...But although we also found their footprints circling the new house, they didn't work too hard to get in past the door and locks. I've heard stories of them digging under fences to break through...but that hasn't really been my experience. We have a small Icelandic sheep flock in the fields behind our house, inside seven foot high fences...again, I hear coyotes all the time, but no one has ever gotten past the fence. Maybe if they were hungry or determined enough? There always seems to be plenty for them, at least as far as squirrels and weasels and mice, and maybe they're like anyone else - they'll exhaust the easy food supplies first before risking a break-and-enter.
           We think the ones we brought home from that trip, the one whose spine ultimately ended up inside Reliquary for a Trickster, probably died that way - shot by a farmer or rancher and then dumped in a bone pit that is used by hunters and DOT workers mostly to dispose of mule deer remains. It was sad...his whiskers and the fur on his front legs was still intact. We buried it outside for a year or so before I handled it, to let it break down a bit more. All the bones were clean when we went to retrieve him. His skull is here, next to the computer. Based on his teeth, I would guess he was quite young. 

 

 

This is the only time I've seen a coyote actually take something down...a young female deer, probably less than a year old. The snow had a hard frozen crust on it, and deer hooves punch right through that, which slows them down quite a lot...whereas Coyote wears snowshoes...She fell behind her herd, and he took her. I don't think she would have lived much longer anyway...there isn't much for anyone to eat in the winter. You can see a bunch of magpies surrounding Coyote, and in the days to come, we also saw eagles, crows, and ravens. Life wants to live, I guess...It was so sad, but her death meant a lot of other creatures lived through the winter from her.