By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Note: this is the third article in a four-part series about the people, art, and architecture of my “Third Place,” the Utah Catholic parish church my wife and I have attended for three decades.)
A delicate chisel and a powerful hammer forged two of the most distinctive features of my third place—St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Cottonwood Heights, Utah.
While they were building the church in the early 1990s, chief architect Michael Stransky and pastor Fr. Terry Moore considered essential but mundane questions related to proper pipe size and HVAC needs. Fortunately, they also pondered other important questions, such as what one will see and feel upon entering the building.
To help answer the latter set of critical questions, Moore and Stransky hired several local artists, including Salt Lake woodworker Tom Tessman and noted Utah sculptor Neil Hadlock. Both were very talented and interesting characters.
The Minnesota-born Tessman’s 2014 obituary leads with a line from “Anthem,” the poem/song written by musician Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.”
This lyrical reference might acknowledge the cracks in Tessman’s personal life. His final tribute does note that the artist had three wives and “three children who share his odd wit and intelligence.”
And yet, Cohen’s lyric probably also describes Tessman’s artistic philosophy. After all, the artist did include hundreds of cracks in the huge wooden screen he designed and constructed for St. Thomas More’s sanctuary.
Dozens of tiny interlocking wooden crosses and cables form the mahogany screen. The cracks/spaces in between offer glimpses of the tabernacle behind it, but they also filter the lovely colored light that flows in from stained glass windows on the church’s towering eastern wall.
The wooden screen is a treasure that’s inspired beautiful wood features elsewhere in the church, such as Tessman’s pulpit and artwork created by parishioners. Tessman’s work graces other parts of Salt Lake City too, including his two dozen pavers on Pierpont Avenue downtown that say the word “heart” in 25 different languages.
Speaking of art with heart, The Salt Lake Tribune has said that Neil Hadlock—another artist hired for the St. Thomas More project—sculpted with “weight, elegance.” Hadlock likely would credit two generations of family blacksmiths for that unique combination of skills.
In 1996 he told the Tribune that while growing up, “I lived pretty much in a world where ideas could happen and although many things have changed and become more complicated, I still live with the thought that ideas become real.”
Born in Idaho in 1944, and then educated at both the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, Hadlock taught sculpture at BYU and for a time even owned and operated an innovative metal foundry and bronze works.
Although he tried to incorporate modern new methods into his sculpting, Hadlock always emphasized, “I still believe it is important to stay close to the stuff of the earth: iron, bronze, stone, clay, graphite, and pigment.”
As a result, Hadlock is acclaimed for his “monumental abstract sculptures” made from that “stuff of the earth.” Most famously, this includes “An Urban Allegory,” the stainless steel torso-in-motion sculpture just outside the Delta Center, home of the Utah Jazz basketball team.
In the early 1990s, architect Stransky and pastor Moore asked Hadlock to create the granite altar that anchors the sanctuary as well as the baptismal font at the church entrance.
Both look like Hadlock hammered them out of a nearby alpine quarry and then hauled them right into the sacred space. The smooth altar tabletop surface rests perpendicularly on a trinity of rough-hewn pillars that blend perfectly with church’s rocky mountain surroundings.
Hadlock’s matching baptismal font, set some fifty feet away, is cut in the same style from the same rugged materials. When Holy Water flows through it, I can see and hear a high mountain spring and waterfall.
Both work well artistically, of course, as the font whets one’s eyes for the larger granite altar beyond. But it all works well theologically too, for it is Baptism that opens the door to Eucharist.
Hadlock has said that art touches our emotions and “awakens hidden knowledge that is life-confirming.” That’s exactly what I’ve experienced at St. Thomas More, thanks to both Tessman and Hadlock.
And due, in no small part, to two other local church artisans. I will tell their stories next week, in my final installment about the lovely art and unique architecture of St. Thomas More church.
Here’s a look back and ahead:
August 5, 2024: Third Place: People, Art, Architecture (the church becomes a “third place” for my family and me, thanks to people, art, and architecture.)
August 12, 2024: My Third Place: A Landmark Project for the Catholic Church (the story of the unique building design and the visionary priest and architect who imagined it.)
August 26, 2024: My Third Place: Not Your Average Statues or Stained Glass (the story of Utah immigrant women who crafted unusual statuary and stained glass with their uncommon artistic eye.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
