Asheville Citizen-Times
North Carolina, USA - Mark Garner creates a handmade, one-of-a-kind product.
But he doesn’t consider his work to be art — rather to be an artist’s tool.
His handpan instruments are not the painting, but the paintbrush, he says. The handpan, a percussive metal vessel shaped like a UFO, isn’t complete until the musician strikes one of the tone fields hammered into the surface, Garner said.
Although the instrument requires hands to be activated, it’s extremely hard to get your hands on a handpan, which is essentially a variation on the steelpan tradition.
There’s only a handful of handpan producers in the world, and each have customer waiting lists thousands long.
Garner, who fell in love with the instrument while living in the instrument’s origin country, Switzerland, in 2009, was inspired to launch his own handpan company, Saraz Handpan, after he was put on one of those waiting lists.
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