Finding the roots of Maria Colin’s art

Holding on to a jumper cable carrying 10,000 volts of electricity, Maria Colin drags the clip across a piece of wood sparking a pattern of lightning.

It’s enough electricity to kill a person instantaneously -- in fact, it killed one of her friends -- but the crafting of these pieces of wood into art puts her in a meditative state that has helped her process the death of her mother.

She was working on her first piece when her mother entered the hospital for COVID-19.

“The day I finished it for my mother was the day we had to shut her machine off,” Colin said.

No hand holding, no final embraces, just a pixelated screen through which she could say goodbye to her mother.

Electrifying wood one Saturday, Colin asked her assistant to the project to turn on the Judds.

“She loved the Judds,” Colin said.

The Roots

Colin grew up in Sonoma where she attended Altimira Middle and went to Sonoma Valley High School.

She had her first child in what would have been her senior year of high school. Each of her four children were born 2 years after the other. All of them were born at Sonoma Valley hospital.

It did not work out with her husband, which is to say that Colin is divorced. After 15 years of marriage, the relationship fell apart due to substance abuse.

“We were young and he was always in another jail,” Colin said.

Her children lived with her in a Boyes Hot Springs apartment until Colin moved them to live with their father -- “he wasn’t there for them either” she said -- and finally with their grandmother.

“I paid for everything that they needed for school, and I was working three jobs where I was living in the creek,” Colin said. “But I couldn’t get out of it.”

Colin was homeless for five years between 2013-2018. During her Odyssey of finding housing once again and taking care of her children, Maria found herself carving wood to pass the time. It’s how she found peace.

“The experience you get when you are outside and sleeping outside, there’s a certain serenity that you get when you’re out in nature,” Colin said.

Now housed, Colin finds that “profound serenity in her art.”

“It puts me right back in that place,” she said. “It’s a beautiful place to be.”

Electric serenity

Colin had began looking into the process of electrifying wood at the end of 2020 when her whole family, except her, tested positive for COVID-19, she said.

“I was nursing everybody,” she said. “And every day when I wasn’t taking care of them, I was just working on a piece of wood for my mom.”

Its beginning was in the disassembled parts of a microwave.

“You just take the transformer out of a microwave and connect it up basically to a pair of jumper cables,” Colin said. “It’s called a Lichtenberg machine.”

In a demonstration, Colin connected two power cables causing a lightbulb on her machine to light -- a signal that the cables “are hot” and dangerous to touch.

Annie Falandes, the founder of Homeless Action Sonoma, said she is terrified when Colin uses her Lichtenberg machine. One of Colin’s friends died while working with one on a piece of wood not long ago, she said.

“Somebody had plugged his machine in for him when he wasn’t ready,” Colin said. “He still had his hands on the wires and he just became the ground.”

The “ground,” in this case, means that his body became the connection of 10,000 volts to the earth.

When done right, the wood takes on the charge of electricity, burning differently varying on the type of wood being used. On a hot September Saturday, it’s a piece of raw redwood. It’s been sanded down and cleaned with water and baking soda, the latter works as a conductor for the current.

One jumper cable is anchored to the wood with a nail that Colin hammered. The other cable she handles with a thin rubber glove and drags along the face of the wood. The currents of electricity, like small domesticated lightning, travel from the nail in the wood to the cable in her hand.

“No matter where they are, they find their way to each other,” Colin said. “Chance,” Colin says to her assistant who’s helped her move wood, “will you turn on some of the Judds?”

From seedling to centerpiece

Colin now has over 80 art pieces she has electrified this way since early January when her mother was taken off life support. Each with burns that look like bonsai trees, or maybe a river delta from an airplane.

“What I love is that every piece has its own story,” Colin said.

And each completed art piece is branded with a butterfly in homage to her mother, an image she found while going through old notebooks her mother had once owned. After their grandmother’s death, Colin’s children began working with her on some of the projects.

“My daughter’s even getting into it with me. She’s going to be creating some pieces of furniture,” Colin said. “She says it’s because mine’s too old-fashioned for her.”

She still hasn’t sold some of the pieces she’s worked on with her family-- they’re too precious to give up. Other pieces she wants to sell, but only to the right person.

In some ways, electrifying wood has become a family pastime for the Colins. Not just to create art together, but to grieve the death of her mother and the children’s grandmother.

“It was therapy. Nobody would talk. We’d all be sitting there, standing on our table or doing it together,” Colin said. “It was a very humbling feeling.”

Colin remembers a time when a bobcat sat beside her when she was living by the creek and carving wood by moonlight. She remembers sleeping in a friend’s tree house when she was homeless with her children and the coded notes they’d leave her when she worked at Taco Bell. She remembers the day she finished her first artwork was the last day she said goodbye to her mother.

“I feel like the past that I’ve walked has definitely brought me here,” Colin said. “Because if I hadn’t been homeless, I wouldn’t have started carving wood to begin with.”

Contact Chase Hunter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com and follow @Chase_HunterB on Twitter