Death with distinction

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - It was nearly a year ago that Lauren Clauson’s mother, Rose Karam, moved in with her daughter. Karam, a legal secretary who died at 78 after a protracted illness, resides beneath Clauson’s living room window, in an artist-designed ceramic prayer wheel etched with stenciled leaves.

Having her mother’s remains close by — in an urn that celebrates Karam’s affinity for autumn in New England, where she grew up — is comforting to Clauson, a 50-year-old transportation planner. “I’ll walk by and give mom a spin,” she said of the vessel, which is attached to a turntable. “Her presence is here.”

The prayer wheel, designed by Christopher Moench, a 47-year-old artist from Bellingham, Wash., is part of an emerging funerary art movement that reached an apotheosis of sorts when the nation’s first art gallery dedicated to cremation urns and other “personal memorial art” opened in January in Graton, Calif., about 65 miles northwest of San Francisco.

The gallery, christened “Art Honors Life,” showcases the work of about 40 artists and craftspeople who are collectively pioneering a new aesthetic of death — creating sophisticated vessels of burnished terra cotta, redwood burl, black glass, even biodegradable paper mixed with ashes from ancient oaks that, in terms of sheer artistic ambitiousness, hark back to the ancient Egyptians.

“Art and beauty can assuage anxiety,” said Maureen Lomasney, the 56-year-old artist and gallery owner who started the concept with a Web site called Funeria, and sponsored a juried exhibition in Philadelphia last fall called “Ashes to Art,” a kind of Venice Biennale for the urn set. “Our goal is to take away fear.”

Although artist-designed urns and other objects are still a tiny fraction of the $11 billion death-care industry, as it is known, the gallery’s opening — along with novelty items such as wind chimes with built-in cavities, pencils made from cremated remains (roughly 250 pencils per person), diamonds made from ash carbon and bird feeders designed to scatter ashes — reflect the shifting demographics of death and disposition.

A decade ago, 21.1 percent of Americans who died were cremated; in 2005, about 32 percent were. The numbers are rising steadily, with the Cremation Association of North America forecasting a cremation rate of 51.12 percent — more than half America’s deaths — by 2025.

Located in a charming wine-country hamlet, rather than in a cemetery, the new gallery taps into growing consumer demand for “personalization,” especially among baby boomers nearing the finish line.

Many of the objects, such as “Offerings,” a $1,100 participatory artwork by Tamar Kern of Newport, R.I., are intended to help mourners with celebratory rituals. For “Offerings,” Kern reproduces casts of hands, with what she calls their “unique tracery,” in fine silver, as a vessel for scattering or a family heirloom.

“The customization of the culture now includes life-cycle rituals like writing your own wedding vows,” said Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University and the author of “Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America” (University of California Press, 2002). “Today, not having a cookie-cutter life also means not having a cookie-cutter death.”

Lomasney, an artist and photographer, was inspired to start Funeria — a name she invented because it sounded Italian — after reading a 1997 newspaper article about rising cremation rates. She combed Internet sites like Urnmall. com and was horrified by what she saw. As The Cremationist magazine noted last year, urns have traditionally been regarded as “somber functional containers rather than as an opportunity to express the unique taste and character of the individual.”

In terms of artistic audacity, Lomasney may be in a league of her own, representing pieces like the whimsical Urn-a-Matic, a vintage vacuum cleaner that flashes home movies on a builtin screen while playing the 1970s pop song “Seasons in the Sun.” This kind of high style doesn’t come cheap: the Urn-a-Matic costs $1,900 (most of the works are in the $800 to $1,200 range and are designed to prescribed dimensions).

Lamont Langworthy, a 76-year-old architect in Sebastopol, purchased a patinated copper urn with a “Zen feeling” from Lomasney, in which he said his own ashes will eventually be housed. “I’ve always disliked the idea of spending a lot of money to throw people into the ground,” he said. “Once you’re gone, you’re gone. But at least art brings it one level up and blends in with your decor.”