Reliquary

Philip E. Harding
October 17, 2006

This sculpture is one in what I hope to be a large series of sculptures exploring themes of memory and value. It touches on some of the issues raised in my essays “Cultural Memory” and “Manifestations of the Sacred,” also posted on this website. I am interested in the questions of meaning, power, and sacrality as they relate to an objects and places. Is there such a thing as value that is intrinsic to an object or place or is it only our memories and associations that give an object meaning or power. Does the power of a saint’s relic only have the power to heal or change the lives of those who believe it does? When a shaman dies does the power he experienced and made use of in his masks, medicine bundle, or ancestral carvings cease to exist? In a materialistic culture there was never any power there to begin with and the only value a relic or carving may have is in its collectiblity. If it is a rare relic or carving, if it was once owned by shaman known to history or even by a collector known to history, these things can effect its commodity value but it’s “power” can not.

I think about some of the nick knacks in my parent’s house. Some of them are generations old but the stories have not all been past down with them. For me they have value that is independent of their worth as antiques but there is no way to measure or judge that value. And when my parents are dead, and when I and my brothers are dead, and our memories and associations of these objects are gone, what value will remain? Will my nieces and nephews be able to form new memories and associations with these objects sufficient to carry these along in the family another generation? I realize these are very small, insignificant things and yet the questions are universal, true of every family. Such objects are part of a family’s story even when the words no longer remain.

I think about things from my life. When I look at the objects around me it is like a resonance chamber vibrating with the memories and associations of my life. Is any of this an experience that can be captured and conveyed in an art object? If I write the story of each object, if I write my story, if I declare that a thing has meaning and power, can that be communicated? I know how it goes with all things of value. It exists to the extent that people hold it. If someone buys the reliquary then they get all the stories that go with it. They get part of my life, a conversation that comes up whenever the reliquary is encountered. And the way of art, it will appreciate by the very act of someone buying it and appreciating it. But if no one buys it then the value is lost. It is too cumbersome for anyone in my family to take on. It will be dismantled. It will only remain to history as a photograph.

And what can I say of the objects inside this reliquary?

A glass globe like one containing a rose floating in water delivered when my sister died
A braid of sweet grass from my smudging days
A bit of cedar and sage from those same days
A broken pocket watch
A sea shell
A whistle
A bit of old lace
A die from a game of D&D (which always ended in an argument)
Wooden beads from a girl who died shortly after she gave them to me in 1978
An earring that belonged to my sister who died in 1974
A bottle dug up in the desert containing a bit of plaster scratched from the wall of the “tomb of Christ” where they take the tourists and pilgrims in Israel, and a bit of grime collected from the floor of the prison where they say Peter was held in chains, plugged up with the stub of a candle from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Tree seeds from the “Grove of the Patriarchs”
A tiny chip of stone picked up on the Temple Mount
A bit of woven yarn
A pellet of fur and mouse bones collected at the base of a basalt cliff below an owl’s nest
A small wasp’s hive
A strip of leather from a keychain
The base of an old brass lamp
Two “Sancto-lite” jars, one containing beads from Kenya, a dozen herbs (some purchased, some collected, some given to me by old friends I lost contact with), rose petals from a high school prom, tobacco, feathers from a gold finch, and things I can’t remember, the other containing mullein flowers collected a little each day from a wild stock I let grow in my front yard one summer. One jar is cracked. One is not.

There may be more. My memory is not what it once was. And what is any of this worth? It has never been exhibited in a gallery or museum or received a critic’s review. It has never been venerated in a shrine or been part of any ritual, private or public. In a sense, this is part of my own personal “medicine bundle.”

As I said at the beginning, I hope this “reliquary” is the first of many. When the life of a fellow artist spiraled out of control about eight or nine years ago and he lost his studio I collected up his personal effects to keep the land lord from hauling them to the dumb – objects from his parents, his marriage, his life of thinking about art, his alchemy supplies, his tools and more. I would like to create a “reliquary” that is part of him. I will never have the memories and associations for his things that he had but I believe these things are worth more than random yard sale finds. I want to create a reliquary that is a biography of objects rather than words. I would also like to build a nuclear reliquary. The windows for these window box reliquaries come from houses built for workers who produced the plutonium used in the bombs tested at Trinity and dropped on Nagasaki. In Shinto practices stones are sometimes treated as revered beings with rice straw ropes tied around them. I would like to go to Nagasaki and bring home a stone that was there on the day the bomb was dropped and place it in the box, perhaps on a bed of dry grass collected at the site where Trinity, the first atomic bomb, was detonated.

Index