After I’m done with them, cookie tins no longer resemble cookie tins. Sona tubes/ plaster/ spray-foam insulation are no longer hardware store inventory. Cloth is no longer cloth. It all speaks now of forest/village/global communities and environments, with a highly detailed colourful imprecision.

 

I make use of the world’s materials and the world’s innuendos. But these are my own sculptural constructions. My processes, my little jokes and commentary. With the hot solder, an aroma of cinnamon or lavender rises up, from the previous occupants of the tins. So, as with any mixed media sculpture, the almost-scent of the found object flavours the piece. Reminiscent of how we are all always inescapably shuffling through the magical detritus of this complex world.

 

I wonder if the world is surprised at where human evolution has led. Who would have thought that something as beautiful and brilliant as human beings could turn against the very ingredients of our own existence?

 

Each of us has just borrowed a set of molecules from the universe’s available supply. And we will need to give it all back one of these days, like returning a book to the library.

 

So how do we manage to see ourselves as NOT part of the world? We are made out of exactly the same stuff. Our blood uses the same water that rivers use. We all breathe what the trees breathe. We are nourished by the same proteins and minerals that nourish the eagles.

 

And yet— Poisoning the water that runs through our own veins? Making our nests toxic to our own young? Murderous and brutal even to each other? Must seem so crazy.

 

The hubris! — that people are more important than the actual kindly dirt and water. That some people are more important/smarter/better than other people.

 

How has it become so crucial to be us not other? (Is this just mostly in western cultures?)

 

As if demonizing our superficial differences will make us feel finally at home in our own skins, the Other is thrust away, dominated, oppressed, hated. In thrall to binary thought, male identity is all tied in with being not-female/other. Racism means that whites cling to being not-black/other. And who ever mandated that human identity depends on our domination over the earth? How is the earth Other?

 

Of course, the binary fantasy is a flawed construct. Life is not binary, any more than inhaling and exhaling are separate stand-alone processes. Nothing about the world, or anybody/anything in it is Other. We need so badly to learn that.