by Michele Corriel Distinctly Montana Thursday, September 01, 2005

Stepping onto marbled floors of the Zoot Enterprises corporate building and at once into a stand of trees, each one opened like a book, is a bit like tumbling down a rabbit hole. The “trees” are reliquaries, containers or shrines where sacred vestiges are kept, each piece an individual homage to various parts of artist Amber Jean’s life. These ten-foot tall cathedrals with carved-out ambries, vaulted recesses, reverently hold her relics. But the minute Amber places them into the sculptures, her personal icons seem to take on universal significance.

The idea of elevating common objects to a spiritual level came to Amber while in Germany, visiting a church known as the final resting place of a saint’s knuckle bone.

“The reliquary consisted of a box inside a box, inside another box, and sat on a stand which must have weighed a ton, for all the gold and glob,” Amber wrote in her artist statement for the pieces. “Slender spun thread held the bone. The attempted illusion of magical suspension seemed comically befitting the odd juxtaposition of the pomp and filigree, which housed a dull, dark, dusty bone. The whole cathedral was built to house the relic. It was fascinating.”

Years went by before Amber was to make her own version of the reliquary, before the concept materialized in its present form.

“These pieces are really personal,” she says, arching an eyebrow, evaluating the pieces in front of her. “For me they are the kinds of spiritual experiences that I’ve had, poignant experiences, and they have a lot to do with nature and being outdoors. But I also find the more personal I get with my work, the more I pare it down, and use symbols, the more it resonates. That’s where the mythology takes place, where bridges can be gapped, and people can come together – it’s so much about me, that it becomes less about me. Specific and literal are so different, but they walk the same path. I don’t think that what I had in mind while I was making these pieces is so important any more.”

In perhaps the strongest piece of the five, “Unseen Moves,” Amber uses arrows as the overriding symbol in the sculpture. They penetrate from the rounded scraped bark side of the log and protrude in deadly points on the exposed insides. The arrows are tapered sharp with intent, accuse through the blackened portal, while on the opposite side the shafts are adorned with stalks of wheat, flipping the purpose of the arrow into a more pastoral role.

“The wheat arrows are a recurring theme,” Amber says. ‘It first came out in a piece called ‘Amber Waves of Grain’ about my grandfather, who was from the Midwest,” she says. “I remember walking through this tall grain on a visit there. In this piece the wheat arrows create a constellation from one side.”

Objects representing people, icons representing ideology, trees standing tall inside of structures all combine here. Every day items transported into the realm of art react with notions of the sacred.

“I wanted to get the point across that a relic is just a thing it’s what we attach to it that brings its importance,” Amber says. “You can have a tee-shirt lying the dirty laundry or you can have a tee-shirt that Lance Armstrong wore and won a race after he fought cancer. It’s the significance of the shirt rather than the shirt itself.”

Which begs the question of personal relics and religious relics, or more exactly the distinction we place on the two. For example, in one piece that is dedicated to her dog Shiva, the dog’s collar is placed in a venerated niche. For some that might be considered blasphemy, for others a small token of the importance a dog can have in a person’s life. When Amber first thought of doing these large pieces, the inspiration came to her in a dream.

“I had this dream of three eggs,” she says. “The same day I went to the bookstore to buy a biography recommended by a friend` up a book that had three eggs on the cover, and a friend asked me to look up a passage in another book about synchronicity and on the next page was a nest with three eggs. It was all in about 24 hours. It was an affirmation that I was on the right path. So I knew that one was the first piece. I didn’t know what the others would be.”

The piece with the eggs is called, “Secret Miracles At Work,” and also incorporates a steel ribbed bird cage. The ambry holding three eggs is adorned with lace. The eggs can be easily removed/ they’re only placed there, not glued. The effect invites intimacy and denies the untouchability of what is considered precious.

“I had these logs in my studio,” Amber says. “I was brave enough not to question what I was doing. Wood take you in a direction you might not think you’re going to go, but also I’ve gotten good enough, as a craftsman, that I can impose my skill – but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I had to learn to pull back and not over-parent the work.”

At first Amber thought the pieces would be horizontal, laid out like caskets, opened up as if for viewing. That was right after September 11th.

“But when I went out to harvest the trees, and stood them in my studio, I was in a different place,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be morbid anymore. I wanted a revelation of beauty and birth. So I was glad it changed for me, when it came time to actually create them. They defiantly change the space they go into.”

This sculptural forest cultivated in the lobby of the Zoot building completely transforms the space, creating a refuge of sorts, where floating musings alight. They’re tightly placed and it looks like a woodland. Having them near the main entrance entices yet also instills a sort of trepidation. But once committed, the viewer is totally surrounded, altered.

Amber lives outside of Livingston, in a cabin at the end of a road, and is a self-proclaimed hermit, at times. This year she began to ice climb and the experience of climbing onto a sheaf of ice has impacted her artistic mind as well as her physical being. In one of her pieces, “I too have Heard the Dead Singing,” she incorporates sheets of glass, sharp and thick, dangling from above the carved mountains.

“The glass reminds me of the ice climbing I’ve been doing,” she says. “And I make a lot of things using the elements of wood, steel and glass. They‘re intriguing to me, when used together. There’s a fragility and a nobility to glass, it’s grandmotherly, very feminine, and glass is so beautiful.”

Amber’s reliquaries came to Bozeman after showing at the Paris Gilson Museum in Great Falls. Next the Reliquaries will go to Buchanan Capital, in Billings.

“This is the first corporate place I’ve had work in,” Amber says. “it’s just an idea that’s growing. There’s a world out there that leases art rather than buys art.”

In the end it’s all about getting the work out there, but for Amber it’s also about teaching people how to tell their own tales, increasing their vocabulary to include art.

“I’m developing this notion of a non-profit,” Amber says. “I’ve been working with children a little bit, and it seems to me artists are storytellers, who can help others to come at things from a different angle, in a place that’s not a classroom. But now I want to step out of the studio, and work with children, introducing this idea of adventure, that works on so many levels, not just the big, wow x-games kind of things.”

Amber also does traditional carvings for home furnishings, more functional works, mostly on a commission basis. (See her website at www.amberjean.com)

“But these are the pieces I’m working on now,” she says of her Reliquaries, “I like people to have to touch art, interact with it. I’d like to do some big public works where people would have to have even more contact wit6h the art. I’d like to do fountains – take a step into the public domain. The medium I work in has been, intrinsically, labor intensive. They really take a long time to create. So then, I have to ask a certain price, and I have to include the cost of the materials too, which makes them automatically available only to an elite type of buyer. A lot of my work has gone into second homes, but that doesn’t allow me to get my work out to the public. This is a stepk, charging a loan fee to corporate businesses for them to have the sculptures for a certain amount of time. This way the pieces can stay together and I like the idea of these pieces being in one place, not selling them off one by one.”