"My Mother's Legacy" by Sarah Hutt

Etched with love
Artist honors mother
by Tyrone Beason
Seattle Times staff reporter

One of the things Boston artist Sarah Hutt remembers about her mother, who died of breast cancer when Hutt was 13, is she liked to peek underneath plates, bowls, cups and saucers to see where they were made.

Hutt, now 51, has turned this quirk of her mom's into a poetic biographical tribute, told in illuminating sentences burned on the bottom of 1,000 wooden bowls.

" My mother believed in Original Sin," Hutt tells us on one bowl.
" My mother had an exercise routine" on another.
" My mother said don't trust a man that can't dance."
" My mother had her own set of tools."
" My mother called me by all my names."

The piece, actually a work in progress, is titled "My Mother's Legacy." Memory-by-memory, bowl-by-bowl, it recalls the spirit and attitudes of a woman who must have been unforgettable.

A selection of wooden bowls from Hutt's project, along with photos of others, is on display at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle until Oct. 31. Hutt will be the bookstore's guest of honor at a Visiting Artist Reception on the First Thursday gallery walk, Oct. 3, from 6 to 9 p.m. The public is invited to attend.

The project started in 1995, following the 30th anniversary of the death of Hutt's mom, Carmellia Louise Ann Naputano Colonnese Hutt. The artist likes to use all of her mother's names. It makes her complete.

The act of picking up each bowl is therapeutic, because it makes us stop and really think about the many aspects of our own lives - the thousands of aspects, details which make up an entire being. In finding these specific parts of her mother, Sarah Hutt has helped jog our memories of our lost loved ones.

The elder Hutt was just 47 when she died, about the same age as Hutt when she started her project. Hutt struggled for a way to memorialize her mom. Her illness and death weren't discussed much when she was growing up in Hastings, Michigan.

At one point, Hutt started jotting down short anecdotes about her mother on 3x5 cards but she soon realized that a few memories wouldn't quite capture her mom. " The only way I was going to know who she was was to take all of her memories," she said. "I started each line with 'My mother.' I set a goal of 1,000 memories."

Hutt's challenge was to find the right way to present such an overwhelming list. She definitely wanted to share it with others.

" For some reason, I had the idea of wood burning," she said. The earliest pieces in the project are large serving bowls, inscribed using a wood-burning kit. A hot metal wire attached to a small rod heats up, which makes it function much like a pencil against the wood.

Hutt, who works in the Boston Mayor's Office as an artists' advocate, set some conditions for herself as she culled her memory. She forced herself to think from the perspective of the 13-year-old girl whose mother had just died. She didn't want the benefit — or perhaps unfair judgment — of hindsight. But all those images and motherly sayings wound up benefiting Hutt in unexpected ways.

Hutt said she was inspired by the words of Virginia Woolf (whose own mother died when Woolf was in her early teens) who said that writing about her mother released her from her memories. " I didn't forget my mother when I wrote things down," Hutt said. "I just didn't have to remember everything all at the same time anymore."

" I stopped being the daughter of a woman who died," Hutt said, "and I simply became her daughter."

Sections of "My Mother's Legacy" have been displayed around the country, including breast-cancer awareness events.

But this will be Hutt's first visit to Seattle. The whole project has never been shown at one time because, well, it's not finished. Hutt said she still needs to inscribe about 170 bowls to reach 1,000. The problem is not a scarcity of memories but a scarcity of wooden bowls, she said. Yard sales and Good Will stores have been fruitful.

Hutt would like to finish the project by March and show the bowls in their entirety. For now, she's enjoying sharing little chapters of her mother's story with the world.

" It's been so much fun — I feel like mom and I are taking trips together," Hutt said.