Puck

Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

“I saw Tim’s work well before I met him,” Nisi told me later. “I moved to this neighborhood the same year I moved to Seattle, 1996 or so. The Central District is one of the city’s ‘historically black’ areas. People had warned me against moving here, and yes there were crack hovels and mattresses on the lawn but also BBQ restaurants and beauty parlors and other signs–for me–of home.”

Tim was home, we saw, and Nisi called out, “Hi, Tim! Is it all right if my friend takes some pictures?”

Tim stepped up out of his house, grinned, and said, “Snap away.” I immediately liked this man: trim, handsome, and clearly of the warm-souled persuasion.

He remembered meeting Nisi previously, saying, “I think I was under one of the cars,” and gestured at the street where several old timers sat. They looked in dubious condition to me, but Tim said they all ran.

He was on his way to do a roofing job somewhere 15 miles north of the city, and was planning to ride his bike. But he took time out to show us around a bit.

“I moved here 20 years ago,” he said, “when this house was just a shell.”

A bombed out shell, from what I gathered, as the neighborhood had been ruled by gangs. But now, from roof peak to fence line, the place was a sculpture park in a green riot of summer overgrowth. A Mariner baseball player (or maybe a railroad worker) maniacally aimed a bat-mallet at a panicked-looking lizard crawling down the side of the house, while a red devil leered from a gable nearby, and a ceramic giraffe serenely nibbled the encroaching greenery.

“For me,” Nisi said, “Tim’s place was another kind of familiar, different from beauty parlors, the kind of familiar you find in dreams. It was Ogun I saw erupting fiercely from the garage roof, the West African orisha sacred to truck drivers, smiths, and trailblazers, brandishing wrenches beneath a multi-colored flying motorcycle. After a few years of occasional walks by–long, lingering looks as I passed–I spotted Tim’s legs sticking out from one of his vehicles and got permission to tour the yard. Since then, I’ve had the good fortune to find him home when I came by with my friend Eileen Gunn, and again when walking out with Brian.”

What a sense of humor and wonder in these pieces. Their maker seems surely blessed by Brigid, the Irish goddess of smithies, weavers, and poets, as Tim’s sculptures take up themes of making, as in music, stuff and art.

“Tim likes to let the greenery grow thick around his works,” Nisi said. “Besides smiths and poets, fabers in some other tongue, Brigid is associated with wells, and midwifery, and herbalism. A culture goddess, she’s on the interface, like Ogun, of the seam joining civilization with the wild. Art with nature, grown and made.”

Along these same lines, I think of the Greek verb, poien, “to make,” and root of the word “poet.” Tim is a poet.

His current project, he told us, was building “the Great Wall. First build the ceramic army and then build the Great Wall.” Like the one in the old People’s Park in Berkeley, Tim’s wall wouldn’t stop a horde of wombats much less one of barbarians; it clearly has other intentions. It was certainly going to make groovy nesting for all sorts of birds and other denizens of the wild city, and one more marvel to gape at when walking by Tim Fowler’s home.

A ceramic army? Of angels?

A wall or a series of portals?

Carved wood, ceramics, car parts: these are things that begin with “C” that Nisi and I saw in Tim’s sculptures.

Cars from back in the days when they were called flivvers and drivers were pilots.

The devil plays the drums.

Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.
Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.