flowers and stars
…do not be sad about such small things, for both flowers and stars are small.
- Ceiling, Casa Mila, Gaudi
The garnets were collected in the diamond district in Manhattan. I read that in Burmese legend, rubies and other red stones embedded in the skin protect one from harm. Also, that the garnet was said to be the only source of light on Noah's Ark. In the mythology of gems, garnets represent faithfulness, stability, true friendship and best of all, ability to see clearly in dusk.
The idea that a red stone in your skin would protect you, it seems such a longing for nature to be close. We adorne ourselves with them because they are perfect fragments of nature, storms captured, chemistry in a smooth shape... precious because they are beautiful, precious because they are rare, precious because they are hard to get.
Once, outside the screening of a film, a young man was writing with chalk on the sidewalk “the shapes between people turn into animals”. I still think about those words. Many constellations take animal shapes. The word zodiac comes from a Greek word which means circle of animals.
An astronomer showed me stars and constellations through a telescope and out in the sky. The observatory is five white domes up in a forested area near the University. In the classroom, there are beautiful yellowing photographs of planets taken in the 70’s.
The box is raw pine and originally intended for two bottles of wine. It is wrapped as if it was a treasure discovered by an explorer in some exotic country and sent by post secretly and hastily to the Museum before something could happen to it. The box, in which the piece is stored, is lined with cotton bunting and thick wool to protect the porcelain inside.
The constellations I chose were a group of animals picked for various qualifications including ability to fit on the back of a hand. I wanted a mix as well, as if I was loading a new ark. There are six mammals, four birds, a reptile and a crustacean.
The hands were cast from a mold of a jewelry display hand, one finger slightly raised for the acceptance of a ring. Over the Summer, I hired a ceramic artist currently working on his masters at the New York State College of Ceramics (Eric Mirabito) to cast it in porcelain. Being commissioned as gifts, they exist as separate pieces and simultaneously part of a group.
There is something in the mysterious Gaudi quote that ties these fragments together. I understand it as having to do with a sense of things being interconnected like in an ecosystem, each part of it depending on many other parts which in turn depend upon other parts. And value being a matter that has much to do with perception. And the connection between earth and sky.
Sources: The ivory busts at The Metropolitan Museum of art, Egyptian tile, braille, iron knockers shaped like hands on the painted doors of the houses built into the hilly town of Guanajuato, bare neck displays in jewelry store windows at night, then in the morning with glistening gems spelling out universe after universe across their throats and collarbones.
Melody Owen 2007
