From Private Grief Comes a Public Memorial in Glass

Glass artist William Morris didn’t set out to make a statement when he began creating a series of cremation urns.

He didn’t even think he would mount an exhibition. The project was intensely personal.

His mother, who was in her 80s, died a year ago, and Morris’ sister asked him to create an urn to hold their mother’s ashes. A couple of friends and mentors then died, and Morris also made glass urns for them.

Then came Sept. 11, and Morris felt compelled to keep working in the form as he, and the nation, dealt with more grief and death after terrorist attacks. As the body of work accumulated, Morris decided to share the pieces with the public.

He offered Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum of Art, where he had staged a show in 1999, the chance this summer to premiere “Cinerary Urns.”

The nearly 70 vessels in the collection are arranged in niches in a tomb-like, 20-foot-square space. Using dim lighting with occasional bright highlights that set off the rich blues, reds, yellows, browns and greens of the urns, exhibition designer Graham Graham created a hushed mood that encourages contemplation and reflection.

“This piece is for the mind to stop--a resting place for the mind,” Morris said in an interview from his home in Seattle.

Struggling with the vast concept of death, the mind becomes overactive, demanding to know where, how and why, he explained.

“The mind requires answers and these are answers that can’t be given,” he said. “If the mind is off wandering and traveling in an incessant, never-ending quest for information, where does that leave the soul? The soul requires more than ruminations.

“We try to put words to everything, thoughts to everything. It’s a very, very puny outcome, in my belief. The soul is infinite. The mind is very finite.”

Creating the urn for his mother quieted Morris’ own mind, giving him a tangible task and a focal point for his emotions as he mourned.

“As I was making it, I realized how much this object meant something different to me than any other object I had made before,” Morris said. “I found myself connecting with this object on a deeper level rather than such a cerebral level.”

That initial urn was inspired by a 100-year-old object Morris keeps in his kitchen: an African jar, fashioned from a gourd and a wooden lid, that was used to collect cattle’s blood and milk for drinking.

“The urn was simple in its presence and function,” Morris wrote in a statement about the exhibition. “The true power was in its ability to become the vehicle through which the realm of the unknown is revealed.... As a Shoshone Medicine Man asked, ‘If the dead be truly dead, why should they still be walking in my heart?’ ”

The urns in the exhibition are similar to his mother’s urn--simple in shape but with refined textures and patterns--yet no two are alike. All the lids are attached with unique handcrafted closures created by fiber artists hired by Morris. Four of the urns, larger than the rest, are inscribed “Sept. 11, 2001.”

The exhibition opened June 28 and will run through Jan. 5. It will close temporarily Aug. 19 to make room for a previously scheduled exhibition, and move to another location in the museum. It re-opens in late August or early September.

After leaving Norfolk, “Cinerary Urns” will travel to New York City, where it will be shown at the American Craft Museum from Jan. 17 through June 2003.

The Chrysler is showing “Cinerary Urns” in conjunction with a dozen figures from Morris’ “Man Adorned” series. The warriors, medicine men and other native figures invoke the cultural heritage of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Those sculptures, some reaching more than 7 feet, demonstrate Morris’ ability to make glass look like other materials: leather, bone, clay, stone, even feathers. He colors his pieces by rolling clear molten glass into crushed colored glass.

Morris is a virtuoso, adept at blowing glass into vessels as well as working hot glass into solid pieces, said Chrysler glass curator Gary Baker.

With the urns, Morris has taken glass beyond ornamentation, Baker said.

“Historically, glass has been decorative, and artists haven’t really used it to say that much,” Baker said. “This communicates meaning. It really is intended as a vehicle for contemplation as a whole.

“I see it as a memento mori [an object serving as a reminder of death] for our time and also as a requiem in glass for the victims of Sept. 11.”