Exclusive Originals— One of a kind Sculptural Fire Features

Exclusive Originals are available only at the studio, or you can commission a design tailored exactly to your taste. Exclusive Originals are an edition of one, and you are guaranteed to have the only fire sculpture like it.

My Classic Sculptural Firebowls are signed and numbered in an open edition. As the artist, I draw and cut each one by hand, making them all variable and unique. The strength of the Classics is that their clean, simple designs complement any style of landscape and will never go out of fashion. They have shipped all over the world and bring joy to thousands of people.

The Exclusive Originals line makes it possible for the first time to have an original work of art unlike any other in the world, at a lower price than I normally charge for unique commissioned designs. They are more affordable because the layout remains the same while using different figures every time.

Each Exclusive Original Sculptural Fire Pit features three pairs of animal, bird or totemic figures welded to the edge of the bowl as relief sculpture. In addition, some Originals may have cut-out designs in the bowl, or smaller relief sculpture decorations between the main figures.

I’ve created over 100 figures to choose from. Select any six of these to create your own bowl. The odds of anyone choosing the exact same figures are about 1 in 3.1 billion! Using this online calculator for combinations and permutations, the exact number of possible designs is 3,127,595,016. I’m sure I will continue to create new design elements as well, and when you factor in the cutouts or floral elements that number goes way up.

The designs currently on offer are inspired by Petroglyph figures and Otomi textiles.

Artists at Lascaux used fire to see inside caves, but the glow and flicker of flames may also have been integral to the stories the paintings told… Reconstructions of the original grease lamps produce a circle of light about 10 feet in diameter, which is not much larger than many images in the cave. Geneste believes that early artists used this small area of light as a story-telling device. “It is very important: the presence of the darkness, the spot of yellow light, and inside it one, two, three animals, no more,” Geneste says. “That’s a tool in a narrative structure,” he explains. Just as a sentence generally describes a single idea, the light from a grease lamp would illuminate a single part of a story.

The image above is an Otomi hand-made embroidered textile I purchased from Nahual at Basilica Farm & Flea. These dense, hand embroidered tapestries feature fantastic animals and plants cavorting in a fairy tale setting of magical realism. I found their charm and character so inspiring that I couldn’t leave the studio! Each new design, hot from the torch, delighted me so much I just had to make more.

Inspired by ancestral dress and amate (a sacred bark-paper art practiced by Otomi shamans), and influenced by cave paintings and a belief in nagualism (whereby people transform, spiritually or physically, into animals), this exquisite embroidery emerged in its present form in the 1960s. Merging everyday and mythical depictions of fauna and flora in saturated colors and delightful designs, the textiles evoke the spirit of Mexican magical realism in a vibrant combination of Otomí traditions and contemporary artistic practice.

I’ve always avoided using animal imagery in my Sculptural Fire Pit designs even though I knew they could be very popular. On the one hand, if you’re a nature lover who enjoys the outdoors, it makes perfect sense to use a deer in the woods motif on a fire pit. On the other hand, backlit by flames, it’s easy to read such an image as the opening scene of Bambi when he loses his father to a forest fire.

But mythical, magical creatures— that’s a different story! Perhaps their otherworldly nature is a charm that protects them from the elements.

To make the Exclusive Originals, I brought all of my skills and ideas into the studio and elevated my work to a whole new level. Exclusive Originals are the result of over a decade of thinking deeply about how art and fire best work together.