The First Kukui Bowl's Tale
There was no reason to go back to the corner gallery. I had already been through there, had finished shopping and was waiting for my purchases to be packed. But, I felt an urgent tugging, so without thinking, I walked through the connecting gallery and turned left.
A new shipment of carved bowls had just arrived and was being spread out along the back wall. One of them caught my attention immediately; black and white in a row of ambers, caramels and tans. I took my time, looking at a few of the other pieces and chatting with the artist, J. Kelly Dunn, before finally picking it up. The kukui bowl was as light as a feather. He said it was the lightest wood he had ever worked with. When creating this particular bowl, he applied a white butterfly patch to a small surface split; a traditional Hawaiian method of repair.
Mr. Dunn explained the history of the wood.
The kukui tree that provided the wood once grew on the Bond family estate in North Kohala on the Big Island. It was Mrs. Bond's favorite tree under which she sat to watch traffic go by, back in the days when the main road passed by the front yard. When she died, she was buried under the tree. In due time, her husband passed on and was also buried under the tree and they remain there to this day.
Eventually, a banyan tree took root next to the kukui tree and strangled it. Nearing death, the kukui threw a keiki, a child, off to the side. Workers took down both the banyan and the old kukui, leaving the keiki to take its mother's place.
The old kukui trunk was given to Mr. Dunn, who set it out to spalt, then carved a series of bowls from it. (Spalting is a natural process of bacterial breakdown that infuses the lighter colored wood with streaks of darker color.) The banyan tree was cast aside.
When I first saw the bowl, I felt an immediate connection. When I heard its tale, I was hooked.
After bringing the bowl home, I felt the story was incomplete, so I went online to find out more about the Bonds. It was like stepping into an episode of James Burke's Connections.
In 1863, Reverend Elias Bond founded the Kohala Sugar Company to provide employment for his rapidly dwindling congregation. Taro farmers, used to subsistence living, were being driven away by land privatization and the accompanying taxes that they couldn't afford. The plantation eventually became a financial success. At its peak, it employed 600 people on 13,000 acres of land to produce 45,000 tons of raw sugar per year.
My mother was born on that plantation to immigrant laborers. She never talked much about her life there, only saying that laboring in the cane fields after school was very hard work, for which she was paid 25 cents per day.
Ellen Bond died in 1881 and was buried under her favorite tree. Elias followed in 1896. For over a hundred years, the kukui tree served as the only marker for their graves. Now it has been transformed, like a butterfly, into Art – with a tale.
As a last note, I had tried to visit the Volcano Art Center the evening before, but arrived too late, so I returned in the morning. As fate would have it, the artist himself made the delivery that day, something normally done by his wife. He arrived as I finished shopping, just in time for the Kukui Bowl to make its presence felt and to have its story heard.
First kukui bowl:
The artist: J. Kelly Dunn