About two years ago, my wife Francine got a call from her parents in White Rock B.C., asking her to make two funeral urns for them. Not an unrealistic request, since Francine is a professional potter, but it gave her a wake-up call that her parents were acknowledging and preparing for their passing. At first Francine viewed this as somewhat macabre to be making funerary urns for her own parents, let alone the fact that they were still very much alive and well. After much thought and discussions however, she came to realize that this was quite a privilege to be part of their preparations.
So now the task at hand was to create a vessel suitable for the occasion. Armed with inspirations, shapes were drafted up, designs were sketched out, and glazes were chosen. But since teapots and mugs were her usual fare, urns, she realized would have very different and very specific requirements. So the research began. We started visiting funeral homes and crematoriums, talking to funeral directors and cremation technicians, asking lots of questions that everyone was quite willing to share answers to, and perusing urn showrooms and catalogues. We learned an incredible amount of information about this business, in fact, much more than we needed for the task at hand. But since this article is about the events resulting from that research, let me sum up by saying that Francine created two suitably magnificent urns for her parents and that the process has changed her perspective on death and has opened new doors to her future.
During the research process we saw many styles and options for urns; metal, stone, ceramic, wood and even paper, but the overall selection was mass produced and more often than not, sourced from offshore countries. Canada had very little product on the market, let alone anything hand-crafted. Now, both Francine and I are artists, so this struck a dissident chord with us. We thought that Canadian artisans should definitely be part of this picture. So we contacted artisans that we have known over the years and explained our proposal for a source of one-of-a-kind, hand crafted funerary urns. It came as no surprise that we had twenty or so artisans on board in no time flat!
Well that was the easy part. Now we needed a showroom and a website. We had an 800 square foot building on our property that was filled with “stuff” left over from our family of three girls. So after a ruthless purging, we set out to build a gallery and warehouse. The completed gallery is a compact 300 square feet and the rest is storage for inventory and some remaining girls’ “really important stuff”. The website took a bit longer but it’s now a hard working virtual gallery with most of our inventory on display. I am always as excited as a little boy at Christmas, when the Purolator truck shows up with new work and I have never been disappointed by the quality of our artists. Certainly, in my opinion, some of the finest in the world live here.
Francine and I are quite proud of the fact that we have started a company that is 100% Canadian. With artists from Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia to Saltspring Island in British Columbia and many places in between, we once again feel privileged to be giving our own art community an outlet for their one-of a-kind pieces, as well as offering the rest of the world, the opportunity to choose from some of Canada’s most talented artisans.

John Reid and Francine Hampson-Reid are the co-owners of The Earthen Vessel Inc. in Calgary Alberta.
www.earthenvessel.ca
403.984.7900