The Craft

Every piece you see here took months to make. Not because it had to. Because there is no other way.

Natural lacquer cannot be rushed. Each coat needs days to cure. There are forty, fifty coats in a single urn. Between them — sanding, polishing, waiting. The material decides the pace, not the maker.

Eric Stocker has worked this way for 47 years. He trained under Pierre Bobot in Paris — one of the last masters of 18th-century French lacquer technique. He spent 25 years restoring pieces for France's national museum collections. In 1998, he moved to Cambodia to revive the Khmer lacquer tradition that had nearly disappeared under the Khmer Rouge.

Now he makes memorial urns. The logic is simple: if you're making the last object that will hold someone you love — it should be made with everything you know.

Eric Stocker, fourth-generation lacquer master — 47 years of craft

How a piece is made

The lacquer

Natural lacquer is tree resin, tapped by hand from Toxicodendron trees in Cambodian forests. The trees grow for fifteen years before the first cut. The resin is harvested by six families Eric works with directly — the same way it's been done for thousands of years.

Harvesting natural lacquer resin in Cambodian forests

Each coat goes on by brush — tools that haven't changed in centuries. Then it cures for three to seven days in controlled humidity. Then sanding. Then the next coat.

Twenty layers minimum for a Standard piece. Thirty to fifty for Prestige. Each layer adds depth — that glow that comes from light passing through translucent resin, bouncing off what's beneath, coming back changed. No synthetic finish does this.

The lacquer artist's tools — brushes, resin, implements passed down through generations

The eggshell

This is where patience becomes art.

Eggshell is broken into fragments — some no bigger than a grain of sand — and placed onto wet lacquer one piece at a time. The artisan works by eye, by feel, by decades of muscle memory. Geometric precision for the Turtle. Flowing organic forms for the Butterfly. Constellations for the Milky Way.

Fragment by fragment, placed by hand

A single urn requires thousands of individual fragments. There is no shortcut.

The finished surface — each fragment visible, each one placed by hand

The final layers

After inlay — more lacquer. Five, ten, sometimes fifteen more coats, each polished to clarity. Then the final finishing: 20 to 30 hours with progressively finer materials, then compounds, then bare hands with oil until the surface reaches that unmistakable depth. Like glass, but warmer. Light seems to come from inside.

Dozens of layers, months of work

Prestige pieces

Some materials are too rare and too difficult for the Standard collection. They demand a different level of time, precision, and nerve.

Beetle wings

The iridescent wing cases of Southeast Asian jewel beetles have been used in sacred art for over 3,000 years — in Egyptian scarab ornaments, Thai temple decorations, Mughal textiles. Eric uses them on memorial urns, where their natural shimmer — green, blue, purple, shifting with the angle of light — cannot be replicated by anything synthetic. Each wing case is cleaned, trimmed, and placed individually.

Placing beetle wing cases — a 3,000-year-old technique

The finished piece beside the one just beginning

No two arrangements are ever the same

Abalone mother-of-pearl

New Zealand paua abalone — deep blue, vivid green, purple, pink, all in a single fragment. Eric cuts them into precise shapes to form the hummingbird on the Colibri urns. The bird seems to hover, its feathers refracting light like a living thing.

Gemstones

"The Precious" — Eric's signature piece — holds 52 genuine garnets and 160 genuine emeralds. 20.4 carats total, certified by a French gemologist. Each stone set by hand. This isn't decoration added to an urn. It's a work of art.

The workshop

Eric doesn't work alone. In his Siem Reap workshop, he trains and works alongside a team of Cambodian artisans — over 70% of whom are deaf. Through a partnership with Krousar Thmey, a local NGO, he teaches a craft that requires no hearing, only patience and hands. He has trained over 350 artisans since 1998.

Eric with his artisan — sharing techniques learned over 47 years

Each artisan trained through years of apprenticeship

The open-air workshop in Siem Reap

When you commission a piece, you support this work — the preservation of a nearly lost technique and the livelihoods of people who might otherwise have none.

Preserving Khmer lacquer traditions — one artisan at a time

The Stocker Studio gallery, Siem Reap

A last gift

There are fewer than ten people in the world who can do this work from start to finish. The trees that produce natural lacquer are declining. The patience this craft demands doesn't fit modern production timelines.

Each piece Eric makes is one of a very small number that will ever exist. It's not a product. It's months of someone's life, poured into an object meant to hold what mattered most in yours.