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What is a Spinner?
Spinners are luscious works of animated art, a sort of meditation toy with many benefits, like making conversations more interesting, quieting your mind for sleep, unwinding stress, or replacing a phone addiction.
Most of our Spinners are public art: They already belong to everyone. We’ll explain more about that below.
4th generation woodturner Tom Clark loves exploring wood on a lathe and has been making gorgeous wooden disks for decades. Behavior specialist Grisha Stewart loves interactive, playful art, and is always on the lookout for ways to calm the nervous system and bring harmony to the world.
When Grisha & Tom fell in love with each other, an artistic collaboration also took root. Grisha had the insight to spin crystal spheres on Tom’s wooden platters, instantly transforming visual art into interactive sensory objects. As a result, Grisha’s become a woodturner, too!
We think of Spinners as portable oceans and hand-held public works of art. Playing with a Spinner is quite simple, and that’s the point: some marbles or crystals on a well-crafted disk of wood, and there aren’t any rules. Most are handheld and portable, some are quite large. All are fun and encourage mindfulness.
How Is the Spinner Project Helping Make a Better World?
The Spinner Project is a community art project about belonging, connection, and play.
Each Spinner is a one-of-a-kind, handcrafted work of art. Skilled artists spend many hours, sometimes days, shaping and finishing each piece on a wood lathe (one of the more dangerous tools in a shop). These aren’t mass-produced objects. They are made slowly, with care, and then released into the world as gifts.
Art That Connects People
Some Spinners become part of our Rejuvenation Stations when we do kinship tending at events, where anyone can use them to play, connect, and settle their nervous system.
Other Spinners are on a journey of their own. We have gifted them to individuals, schools, families, community organizations, and other more. The recipients become Spinner stewards, enjoying the artwork with the request to pass it along to someone else.
In this way, each Spinner becomes more than an object. It becomes a moving piece of community art, weaving tangible, playful connection between people across all the divides.
Made by Artists, Carried by Community
Every Spinner is individually crafted by hand and requires specialized skill and significant time to create. Right now, artists are making them in their spare time and gifting them whenever possible.
A Gift That Keeps Moving
Each Spinner is numbered, and we hope to document its journey through stories, photos, and videos as it travels around the world.
Whether a Spinner is experienced at a public event, purchased to bring into someone’s life, or gifted onward to a new steward, each one helps carry the project forward.
Support the Project
- Patrons: Until now (Autumn, 2026), we’ve deliberately kept Spinner-making within the realm of public art. We’re experimenting with offering a limited number of Spinners for sale. The goal isn’t to turn the project into a conventional product business. Funds from these sales help support the creation and sharing of Spinners as public art. We are also still hoping you’ll share your spinner with lots of people, and maybe even gift it to the world.
You can currently find a limited selection at NW Food and Gifts, 445 NE 3rd St, McMinnville, OR 97128. - Artists: Are you a skilled woodturner interested in creating a Spinner and gifting your work to the world? Contact us. The Spinner Project is an invitation to make something beautiful, give it freely, and see where it goes.
About the Artists: We Love Movement and Play!
Tom is an artisan, dancer, father, and a fourth generation woodturner, joyfully committed to designing and building sanctuary. He began to explore my love for crafting with wood at the age of six when his father built a workshop and reluctantly allowed him access (ok, Tom snuck in at first!), proving to be the perfect place to build with his passion for this material. He’s been playing around with the design of the Spinners for over 30 years, without knowing what they were ‘for.’
Grisha is has a bright mind and a love for movement and connection. She is a dog behavior specialist, podcaster, songleader, and community weaver whose curiosity and playfulness brought Tom’s wooden disks to life, elevating them from objects of tactile and visual beauty to a deeply interactive animated experience with the bones of trees.
We are also amateur musicians and contact improv dancers. We craft songs for community singing as the Butterfly Farmers. The video below has one of our songs for you to enjoy, written with the same intention as the Spinner Project.