Claire Kellerman
// Artist, EcoDesigner, Singer & WriterCLAIRE KELLERMAN is a permaculturist singer, artist, and writer based on Maui, Hawaii. She is the Director and Founder of The Maui Permaculture Network (MPN), and Owner of KLARITY.org: “To inspire and design Peace on Earth through Art, Music, and Home”. Claire Kellerman is a multi-dimensional artist who has vast experience in a variety of artistic disciplines, including singing, poetry, songwriting, Rock and Opera voice lessons, embroidery, watercolors, painting murals and functional art on fabric and furniture, Stone Tapestry jewelry, sewing clothes, quilting, and building Earth Bag homes, domes and Community gardens. Claire’s Permaculture Designs are living art projects created to articulate healthy whole systems living, embracing, and honoring the beauty of Nature.
Website: www.klarity.org
Photo: Claire Kellerman
Interview:
Art is prayer. It allows me to hang out with and explore what hurts, what I love, and to heal the disconnection that separates me from love. Dr. Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith once said to me, “All forgiveness is self-forgiveness.” I see this in my own heart as absolutely true. All I ever wanted was to sing. That was my beacon. I have been an artist in many media, from sewing fabric to building homes and gardens with my own hands, and now 260-acre permaculture community on Maui, Hawaii, HOKU NUI MAUI, LLC. Art and music have saved my life by giving me a reason to live and a way to connect with life in a healthy way.
Art, for me, is the surrender to a vision or a curiosity about capturing in form something I feel connected to, or a combination of colors or patterns that I find in nature. I weave gemstone beads, bone, and silver onto leather in KLARITY Stone Tapestry bracelets and chokers. I paint on fabric and wrap myself in my serenity blanket that is as big as a door frame, so it can be a blanket, a sarong, a beach towel, or travel blanket. It allows me a safe, comfortable place to be wrapped in all the beauty and comfort I felt during the hours it took for the colors and memories of special places to be painted and embroidered onto the cloth. I have my godmother’s art studio door painted on it, showing her walking up the stairs past an ancient oak tree in Topanga, California, a place I have loved since before I was born. My mother and godmother Rabyn were pregnant at the same time there. I have the Blarney Castle’s outline and sprouting grasses in the rock walls from the day I left Ireland last summer. I have a six-foot-tall banyan tree that reminds me that my mother said if I was tree, I’d be a banyan tree. She left me when I was five years old, so her words are treasures, rare, and few. Art allows me to savor the things that make me whole: sitting quietly, listening in the process, and enjoying the beauty that comes from this surrender and allowing when I live with what I’ve created, or give it away to loved ones, and witness their pleasure and gratitude.
Music is another powerful place for me. On a cellular level, as we listen, as I sing, there is a deep resonance and healing with certain music that lights up and invites the soul to regenerate. That is the music I sing. It repairs all the broken heart-cracks and losses and replaces all the spaces with pure divine love. This is my experience and reality since meeting Ger Lyons and since co-creating with my music partner from 2000 to 2008, Rick Kurek. With Ger Lyons, we listen to music and then share what is stirred up, and the courage it takes to heal is present where massive, infinite loving support has been called in with our ancient invocation, and in our circle. It is medicine, this love that pours into us with music. I wrote “One Drop of Love,” a song for my beloved, only to realize in playing it for thirteen years that it is actually more than a song; it is now a well-established healing place. It took me six months to write it, fifteen minutes every night. The words and music continue to wash through me like pure love, and the music heals me every time I play it on my guitar. It also heals others every time they hear it in our Core Transformation and Cellular Healing Workshops with Ger Lyons, and my own Core Clarity healing events around the world.
When I was alone, lost, confused, and hurting from not understanding how to be in this world or in relationships, art and music gave me refuge, and in that refuge my love could shine through. Art and music come from my being nothing except interested in something real, something authentic, something beautiful coming through me. There have been years I could not shake a dark energy that had become a filter in how I saw myself and how I saw the world. It was as if all the trauma, pain of war, genocides, starvation, poverty, and fear had roosted in my heart. I know my soul only wants for these things to dissolve in the world, so I imagine I accepted these things into my field to heal what I could inside me. I accept my responsibility in bringing and being the love I wish to see in the world. It is why I bring my art into the form of earth domes and homes, as taught to me by Nader Khalili since 1993. When I work with the earth in my hands and build a home with a community devoted to cooperation with purpose and care, then I heal and transform. When I bring my artistry to the land, and let nature sing through me, then permaculture design principles are made tangible, and my hope for peace on earth seems logically inevitable, and here, everywhere humans accept and reveal the beauty of their true nature. There is abundance and beauty in nature. I am nature. Art and music bring this back into my awareness, breath and hands, and clear my heart of everything else.
“The words and music continue to wash through me like Pure Love, and it heals me every time I play it on my guitar.”
– Claire Kellerman, Artist, EcoDesigner, Singer & Writer