LOST MOUNTAIN — It’s not easy to get Marlien Hennen to talk about her life. But catch sight of her — joyous smile, girlish frame, tall cedar-bark hat — in front of her studio, and it’s harder still to squelch your curiosity.
Then the door of Dancing Cedar Arts opens, and the contents tell her story.
Inside: a giant thunderbird, its wings made of woven cedar bark, its head an illustrated conk mushroom. A totem pole titled “Harmony,” with glass-mosaic bodies of a frog and raven attached to one perfect piece of cedar skin. Delicate woven-wood frogs that fit in Hennen’s palm; flowers with petals of cedar; a modest basket for eggs; a lanky rooster with a polished driftwood backbone.
With her art, Hennen sings to the natural world, and to the Native artists who came before her.
The artist and her husband, Bruce, moved to Sequim 10 years ago after jobs in construction took them across the globe, to work in Australia, Asia and California.
And Hennen, 51, was already a woman of the world, born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and moving to Singapore, Hong Kong and then to the University of Minnesota. While studying architecture there, she met Bruce, who was earning his degree in civil engineering.
Her work as an architect was mostly about using “a straight edge,” Hennen remembers. These days, she leans toward fluidity — and toward the trees that dominate her landscape.
Cedars provide the raw material for Hennen’s creations, just as they have for the Salish tribes along the wild Pacific coast. When one of her trees, or one of a neighbor’s, is blown down in a storm, she harvests its bark. This way, the artist says, it can live and “dance to a new tune.”
In the years before she moved to the North Olympic Peninsula, Hennen scarcely dabbled in art. Not long after her arrival, she took a class with Carlsborg master basketmaker Kathey Ervin, who works with cedar bark, sweet grass and other natural ingredients. Hennen learned to make cedar baskets — Bruce jokes that she’s “a basket case” — and then kept expanding her scope, like a hawk surveying meadow after meadow.
“I just kept going; I’ve never stopped,” said Hennen, whose most recent show was the Sequim Arts Studio Tour from July 16 through 18.
Through the rest of the year she welcomes visitors who call ahead for appointments to see her studio gallery; she also displays a few pieces at Bauer Interior Design, 119 N. Sequim Ave. in Sequim. And on the first weekend of October, Hennen will teach a couple of cedar-basket weaving workshops during the North Olympic Fiber Arts Festival (see www.FiberArtsFestival.org).
“I like to incorporate a lot of other material,” in addition to the bark, Hennen said, looking up at the plants-into-animals on her walls.
“You’ve got to be a Jack of all trades,” she added, referring to her use of wood-burning tools to draw features onto the conks; buttons to accent the cedar — and her other endeavors happening outside the studio.
In addition to spending several hours daily on Dancing Cedar Arts, she cares for the profusion of vegetables inside the 20-by-60-foot greenhouse Bruce built from scratch, or tends to the 13 chickens running around the yard.
Though there’s a pond and visiting waterfowl beside the house, Hennen said she almost never sits down by the water.
She’s inspired, instead, to recycle and reinvent what comes from the forest encircling her place. She gathers bark, driftwood, and other natural goods, then allows works of art to take shape in her mind. Take your time observing, Hennen says, and a found object’s next life as an animal, a basket or abstract piece will become clear.
Hennen has the patience and attention to produce works both magnificent and intricate. Her thunderbird wall hanging took a good month to execute, while the lavender-accented cedar hat she wore for an interview took a week, and the “Harmony” totem took two months.
The process, she said, is “calming and soothing, like a meditation.”
Hennen pointed out another cedar-bark piece that, at first glance, looks like a wreath with flowing hair.
“It’s called ‘Time to Change,'” she said, showing her visitor how the bundle of innards are expanding outside the ribbon of bark wrapping.
“The way she’s taken traditional materials and made them into contemporary pieces is just amazing,” said Renne Brock-Richmond, the Sequim artist and teacher who organizes the Fiber Arts Festival.
And while Hennen’s art is highly unusual, it’s accessible; each person who visits the Dancing Cedar studio will find something that speaks to him or her.
Travelers have long marveled at how prolific Pacific Northwest artists are, Brock-Richmond added. Reasons include the plenitude of materials — such as cedar bark — and the protein-rich “brain food” such as salmon.
“I’m so glad Marlien is getting out there,” opening her studio and teaching classes, said Brock-Richmond. Her art “reminds us that we all used to make things.”
Hennen added that for decades, the art of native peoples has enchanted her. “When I was in Australia, I fell in love with aboriginal art,” with its paintings composed of countless dots; they continue to inspire the buttons she affixes to some of her pieces.
In recent years, Hennen also has sold her work at the Lavender Festival Street Fair — wowing shoppers with her fan-shaped, lavender-festooned headdress — and other Sequim events.
She also shows pieces and takes commissions via her website, www.DancingCedarArts.com. The prices vary widely, from $8,500 for the thunderbird to $200 for a cedar hat to $11 for a small woven-bark frog.
“It’s difficult,” the artist said, “to put a price on it. Sometimes it takes many months to come up with the idea.”
Now Hennen is also offering one-day workshops for small groups in her studio, in which she teaches techniques with wood and other materials. Her students emerge elated, she said, having experienced something altogether new.
Making art with the forest’s gifts is “kind of a crazy passion,” Hennen said, breaking into another incandescent smile.
Just before her visitor departs, Hennen motions to a stand of bamboo she’s raising behind the studio, for weaving some day into her creations.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.