Places of peace: Lynnette Watts’ shrines are serious yet playful shiny pieces of art

Shrine-maker Lynnette Watts envisions this work dedicated to pigs, for the blessings and amusement they bring to people. Elements of the work in progress include a pig’s head covered in pink buttons and tiny gold-painted pigs added to the ornate frame behind her. She looks for unexpected little elements “to give someone else pleasure.”
Shrine-maker Lynnette Watts envisions this work dedicated to pigs, for the blessings and amusement they bring to people. Elements of the work in progress include a pig’s head covered in pink buttons and tiny gold-painted pigs added to the ornate frame behind her. She looks for unexpected little elements “to give someone else pleasure.”

Lynnette Watts makes highly ornate shrines that are shaped by her family's Catholic values, yet allow for a smile where a smile might be God's will.

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Small as it is, this matchbox shrine measures up to artist Lynnette Watts’ definition of a shrine as “what people need it to be.”

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Lynnette Watts’ home art studio holds shrines completed and the makings of others to come, including an homage to pigs that awaits the addition of snakes (pigs eat snakes) and pearls (pearls before swine). “I come up here and stay pretty much all day,” she says.

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Flowers snipped with tin shears from aluminum cans and a Day of the Dead angel top a shrine by Lynnette Watts, who signs her work Hammons Watts. She always finds a place in her work for “pretty, shiny things.”

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Lynnette Watts made this shrine, titled Sweet Home, for her husband, Michael, on his return from military service in Iraq. Built from an old hutch, it contains a changeable myriad of pieces surrounding an image of Mary, mother of Jesus.

Large as a suitcase or small as a matchbox, her shrines all "contain obvious religious references," she says. But some people appreciate whimsical, even comic touches, as she does.

Pigs make her laugh, and her work in progress centers on a nearly life-size, papier mache pig's head covered with pink buttons and bristles from a paint brush.

Guns make her think, and a previous work evokes Southern gun culture with a cross made of a sawed-off World War II rifle barrel, in a setting made of bullet casings.

Family connects her, and her husband, grown son and daughter, and sister all have received shrines made specially for them. For her quilt-making sister, Cathy: a shrine made with spools of thread, yellow measuring tape and knitting needles from their mother's sewing basket.

"I feel that religion is an intensely personal thing," the 62-year-old artist says. Her challenge is to "try to honor the beliefs and faith traditions of each individual," a unique shrine for the unique believer.

Each piece says something about the maker, too -- about things that just happen to catch her eye, and so happen to wind up in a context of religious iconography: single earrings, Tinker Toys, the sticker off a Chiquita banana.

She collects things -- tea cups, fish bobbers, marbles -- that make a shrine-of-sorts of her studio at home in Little Rock. The upstairs room is a shrine to everything a shrine can be, everything it might take to build one.

She signs the work "Hammons Watts," her maiden and married last names combined, signifying how these works she creates represent the whole of her life. A farm girl who grew up in the Delta near Forrest City, she holds an art degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She learned oil painting and pastels, but shrines don't come from art lessons.

"Shrine" is a heavy word to play with, weighted with sacred connotations. But one thing a shrine can be is a meditative place to find purpose.

Watts retired a year ago as executive director of the Women's Foundation of Arkansas. She found a new purpose in constructing shrines that hold to a self-imposed rule: Buy as little as possible. Use what comes to hand.

"I've had a long nonprofit career," she says. "I enjoyed every minute of it, but I enjoy this, too."

LITTLE THINGS THAT COUNT

• Look in the box, and some of the shiny things that Watts includes are exactly the crosses and rosary beads that anyone might expect in a Catholic setting.

A shrine is a place of sacred thoughts and objects -- a place to find peace, to ask for strength in accordance with Buddhist and Hindu as well as Christian theology.

Some shrines are famous landmarks, notably the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. But many of Japan's Shinto shrines are tucked away so well it takes a guide to find them. A shrine might look like nothing of value to one person, and bring another person to his knees.

Watts applies her idea of a shrine as "what people need it to be." It's a box, most likely, of a size to fit where it belongs -- a corner, a wall, a purse -- and it holds everything it needs or might need.

"If you need extra strength," she says, "that's what a shrine means to me."

Unlike an oil painter, she expects that people who receive her shrines will add or take away from her creative vision to make it more and more exactly what they want to see.

• Look closer, and the shrine Watts made for her retired Army husband, Michael, is ornamented with many-colored round tokens that look like they might be religious medals. The circles turn out to be flattened beer bottle caps.

"I would go in the liquor store and say I need yellow, or green or blue" bottle caps to suit the pattern, she says. Her shrines can be full of little secrets that she worries somebody might take the wrong way, but Michael appreciates the gesture. He calls it "functional."

Michael, a counterintelligence officer, was on duty in Iraq when she made this shrine, her first, about 10 years ago. It came from her purchase of an antique hutch for no particular reason, and yet, it seemed, for every reason.

"I had to have it," she says. In writing on her website, the statement reads: "HAD to have it."

She already had collected all sorts of bits and pieces, a magpie's nest of shiny things that had seemed worth picking up and saving for who-knows-what, who-knows-why. The hutch turned out to be what, and the shrine turned out to be why.

"I began affixing shiny things," she says, "and I've never stopped."

The overall theme of her husband's shrine is devotion to Mary, mother of Jesus, but its makings include seashells, flowers, sheet music: everything from a Chinese good-luck bracelet to skeletal Mexican Day of the Dead figurines.

Most of these objects hold personal meaning. Day of the Dead, for example, is a token remembrance of his Army training in southern Arizona, near the Mexican border. The music is Beethoven, his favorite.

Some things, Michael says, he understood right away. Some, "she had to explain." Some of the pieces are mysteries that might explain themselves another day.

• Keep looking, and that's the idea, she says.

"One of the fun things is taking time to see what's in there."

Look for inspiration, or look for things that might be hard to recognize as the plain, everyday objects they are in such ornate settings.

"There are things around us all the time that we don't realize how pretty they are," she says, "how decorative."

The makings of her shrines include: aluminum cans, old lace, gold leaf, figures of Ganesh (Hindu lord of good fortune), cotton bolls, satin flowers, fabric trim, prayer cards, cigar boxes, Milagros (Mexican folk charms), parachute cord, upholstery tacks, wrapping paper, vaccine bottle caps, antlers, washers, BBs, origami folded-paper cranes, angels.

YOURS, SHRINE AND OURS

"Anybody can make a shrine," Watts says. Art talent helps, but artistry isn't a requirement.

Her son, Louis Watts, is a professional artist in North Carolina. His large-scale works have been featured in the Arkansas Arts Center's Delta Exhibition, and on display at Boswell Mourot Fine Art and Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock.

"Louis is a fine artist," his mother says. "I put myself in the craft category."

Art, craft, soul-searching or just something to try -- shrine-making can be as intricate or as easy as a person wants to make it, Watts says. She offers these tips to get started:

• "What comforts you, what pleases you -- those are the things you put in your shrine."

• "Do you have people you talk to, to give you strength when you need extra help? Put their photos in your shrine."

• "If certain colors help soothe you, make sure to have those colors in your shrine. Think of your shrine as a place that brings peace."

• If you come across small objects that look like they might be useful, she says, trust that they probably are worth keeping. They'll find a place.

"I have dominoes stored away," she says, "and dice, too," and German figurines, plastic piggy banks, Altoids tins, chicken wire, an old shotgun, a guitar with two strings.

• And once started, don't be surprised if a small box is able to contain a whole day's thought and effort. Shrines have been doing that for millennia.

"A shrine," Watts says, "is a place to go lose yourself in."

More information about Watts and her shrines is available at hammonswatts.com.

Style on 09/11/2016

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