Margaret Sullivan
by Audrée Peters

A gourd? What is a gourd?

That is the most frequently asked question Margaret Sullivan of Rio Verde gets when she tells people about her gourd art.

Sullivan makes finely crafted art pieces with gourds, such as her feathered, decorative masks, and her figures, bowls and other assorted objects of art.

A gourd is a unique art medium. A member of the squash family, when a gourd is dried out it has a very hard, woody shell.

“You can do anything to a gourd that you can do with wood, and use anything on a gourd that you use with wood,” she says.

She had never seen a gourd before she and her husband, Frank, moved to Rio Verde eight years ago, and went to dinner at a friends house, where there was a small gourd on the table with chips in it.

“I said, ‘What a beautiful bowl, that is so neat,’ and she said, ‘That’s a gourd.’ And I said – just like everybody says to me – ‘what’s a gourd?’

“So they loaned me a book to read about gourds. It was just so interesting, and I thought, ‘I can do this, and this could be fun.’”

For Mother’s Day, her daughter bought her a bag of gourds.

“And that’s how I got started,” she says.

Sullivan lives and breathes her artwork. She has a room in the house with a workbench and all her decorating items, and a workbench in the garage for the power cutters, saws and sanders.

They sold one of their cars to make room in the garage for her supplies and crates of gourds.

“But I said, what do we need two cars for?” she says with a shrug. “Frank has his golf cart and golfs all the time anyway.”

Her home is her showcase all year. Gourd art adorns the walls, shelves, tables, hearth and every room in the house.

“I have to have a lot of items when I go to a show, and have no place else to put them,” she says.

Sullivan loves what she does, in spite of the fact that “It’s a time-consuming art, every step of the way,” she says.

The first step is cleaning the gourds with a pot scrubber and water.

If she has to cut the gourd open for a mask or other project, she has to clean out the insides using a power drill with a steel brush attachment, because the contents are so hard. She then smoothes the inside wall of the gourd using a drill with a steel ball attachment.

“It’s very labor-intensive,” she admits.

The masks are usually dyed with varying shades of leather dye, and decorated with items such as feathers, horsehair, and semiprecious stones, anything that strikes her at the moment.

But no two pieces of art are exactly the same. She creates something new every time she sits down to work on a piece. Her flair is Southwestern style, although she will create anything that is requested on commission.

“Some gourders will say, ‘I clean my gourd and I commune with it and pretty soon it tells me what it wants to be.’ It doesn’t happen that way for me, and maybe that’s a story and maybe it is true, but you do get ideas.

“When I start out, I decide what I’m going to use material-wise, whether it’s feathers or leather or whatever, and that determines what color I’ll use of dye, and I’ll go from there.

“I use a lot of leather dyes,” she says. “They just look so nice. In fact, people comment that they actually look like leather. It’s just a really nice finish.

Sometimes she just highlights the natural finish of the gourds with acrylics, using an air brush.

She has to import horsehair that is actually used for violin bows, to create the hair.

 “That’s the only type I can get that’s long enough for the masks,” she says.

Feathers are the most expensive item, which she gets from suppliers in Montana, as well as the deer horns she uses.

Originally, she did not put horns on her figures, but her sister once sent her a big bag of them.

“I had them for a couple of years not knowing what I was going to do with them, and finally I started putting them in my Shamans and some of my Kachinas, and I didn’t realize what a wonderful present she gave me until I didn’t have them any more. Now I get them from the two gals in Montana who furnish the feathers,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I need a hunter in the family.”

Sullivan uses leather dyes or acrylics on the various size bowls, and often decorates them with anything from woven pine needles, reeds or sea grass, to wood-burned drawings and patterns.

Her creative imagination is limitless. She is inspired “not to make something that looks like it’s very uniform, but to try to do something different.”

“And actually,” she says, “I never work on just one thing at a time unless I’m doing a commission piece. I usually have half a dozen going at the same time. I may clean half a dozen, and I may cut some, or glue the heads on, and maybe I’ll put the design on three or four of them, and then I’ll dye them. I’m always in different processes and never just on one thing. It would be so wasteful of time to just work on one piece from start to finish.”

Sullivan has taught many classes on gourd art in Rio Verde and Tonto Verde, and also teaches several gourd art classes at the Gourdian Spirits Studio in Cave Creek with the owner and fellow gourder, Jane Boggs.

“It’s fun to teach,” she says, “and see what people can do who think they can’t do anything. And it’s fun sharing.”

Sullivan has created more than 1,000 fine art gourd pieces since she started.

She displays regularly in shows and art walks in Fountain Hills, Rio Verde and Tonto Verde, and in the Pro Shop at Rio Verde.

“Also, everybody knows me by word of mouth,” she says.

Prices for her fine art gourds range from $25-$800.

“I am having a wonderful time. I have ideas forming in my head all the time,” she says.

“It’s exciting to go to bed at night, and while some people have a problem going to sleep, I lay there and think about what I’m going to do the next day, and I’m so excited that, as I’m thinking about it, I go right to sleep. And then I get up the next morning and I’m excited to think, ‘Okay, this is what I’m going to work on today.’

Some of her gourd art can be viewed on her web site at southwestgourds.homestead.com. For more information, contact Sullivan at (480) 471-0017.

This artist was featured July 2006.