Urn Art in the Appalachians

We’d like to share our experience with you about being an Urn Artist in rural America. We’ve lived in the NC Great Smoky Mountain region for nearly 20 years and find it a most inspiring and down to earth place to live and work. We are surrounded by the world’s oldest mountains, the Smokies and Appalachian Chain. Just that fact alone makes is a very grounding place to be. Nature abounds everywhere we look from our Appalachia Urns workshop, housed in an authentic tobacco barn. Wildlife, trees, gardens, wildflowers, farm animals and wildlife are everywhere….how could we not be inspired? The pictures in this blog are what we get to see when we go to work each day. We hope you’ll enjoy them, giving you a peak into our lives.

          

We get to work with natures medium,….wood. We use down trees and native hardwoods, such as maple, black walnut, cherry and the like to craft our urns.  Working with a natural product is very inspiring as the wood so often dictates how it should be turned to best highlight its qualities.

Despite the remoteness of our area, we are surrounded by many artists from potters, candle makers, jewelry makers and the like. All of the artist really support each other and enjoy having connections with other like-minded friends and neighbors.

In addition, it feels good to do work that is service, not labor. Crafting urns is very heartfelt work. We are providing a vessel of beauty, created with reverence, to people during a very challenging time. We hope that our urns can bring them a sense of peace knowing they are memorializing their loved one in a beautiful and thoughtful way.

We feel very blessed to do the work that we do, where we do it. We hope more and more people will support the many hand-crafted artists from rural areas. Most are not making tons of money as they might if they had a gallery in a popular city, but are living their dream, living in a way they want, and living their “right livelihood”.