ABOUT

Tender Fire Studio is an experimental project of the Rev. Dr. Marisa Egerstrom, a recovering academic, ordained Episcopal priest, and wilderness seeker. She is currently leading a complete transformation of the historic Florence Congregational Church into a broader, inclusive, pluralistic center for community building and spiritual exploration.

ARTIST STATEMENT

What's the supply chain for your soul?

Human beings materialize our deepest longings for peace, freedom, joy, and connection in the adornments of our bodies and homes. Tender Fire Studio is a project of imagining the human need for beauty in a world after plastic and petroleum-based industrial production. Artists have always been engineers and problem solvers. Now we are called to work in the old ways that are new again: locally sourced, handcrafted, fairly exchanged and community-minded. Practicing joy doesn't have to leach microplastics for a thousand years. I invite you to imagine with me a joyful future for our shared planet.

Follow the adventure on instagram: @tenderfirestudio

Art in search of soul

"Tend the fire of your own heart," said the inaudible but clear voice, somewhere in my chest, as I stirred coals to keep warm on the last night of a four day wilderness fast. Tender Fire became my trail name when I hiked the Long Trail, and a reminder of a larger, healthier way of being that included parts of myself I had lost touch with along the way.

One of those parts was art. I have been making art since I was a child. Some of my materials stash dates from teenage projects, and I have carried those now-vintage supplies with me from Minnesota to California to Massachusetts. As my spiritual life has developed and ripened, I realized my art was the expression of a naturally arising spirituality, perhaps what some of my Buddhist teachers call "natural compassion" or "natural goodness." It is a way to pray without the interference of piety, which in modern Western peoples is loaded with a soul-numbing self-consciousness, if not outright moral narcissism. When I am working a piece of wood to highlight the awesome (literally awe-inducing) patterns and fractals of the grain, the praise of What Is burns in my chest, my hands find right action in the long hours of sanding and shaping, and I forget to think about stupid things like whether I am a Good Person or how special I am or how terrible the media spectacle of the day is.

Material spiritualism

As I returned to art in the beginning of the pandemic, my incredible neighbor and friend John Fabel enthusiastically and generously began showing me how to use power tools in the workshop we share. He continues to be a bottomless well of skill and knowledge and this project would never have happened without him. It was his spontaneous rapturous sermons on the properties of various materials, though, that sparked my first thinking about what I now summarize, in a reversal of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's formula, as "material spiritualism."

Material Spiritualism is a distinctly feminine rejection of two thousand years of Western imperial Christianity's insistence that the abstract is better than the particular, that the life of the mind is better than - and separate from - the work of the hands and body, and that rationality is superior to intuition. From this logic it follows that gloriously huge earrings are unprofessional. Or that naturally textured hair is messy. And so on. As it turns out, natural spirituality always threatens hegemonic regimes and their institutions.

Rejection is the easy part. The hard part is building something better in its place. In this regard, I consider myself a salvage artist. Just as I rummage through my neighbors' trash like a possum, looking for waste that could be repurposed in service of beauty, so I sift through the bloody and toxic history of my own faith, looking for those parts that have life, while letting go of those that don't.

Influences

Perhaps natural spirituality is nothing more or less than curiosity - sincere, nonjudgmental, open-ended interest. The artists, healers, thinkers, seekers, and teachers that I find influencing my work most these days include:

Carl Jung, James Hillman, and the archetypal psychologists
Martín Prechtel, especially his work on grief and praise
Ethiopian iconographers
Marc Chagall
Pema Chödron
Indigenous weavers of the Americas, especially the Diné weavers
Gordon Coons

Interested? I hope to write more about each of these influences and others as they inform my attempts at imagining a joyful future for the peoples of this planet.

Let’s Work Together

Get in touch so we can start working together.