Week Four
A practice can’t be built on creative prompts alone.
The Piece That Didn’t Land
Week Four of the Reliquary Engine asked me to write a fable and make a piece in response to it. I'll be honest — I wasn't sure the fable form was right for my work, and I sat with that uncertainty for longer than I should have before starting. The deeper issue, which I only see in retrospect, was structural: my focus is about memory, encoding, the prosthetic life of objects, and the fable form wasn't built to carry that question. I tried to make it work anyway, and was lost from the jump.
The Collision
Week Four Inquiry Can this method of idea generation provide depth to my practice?
I devised a story set in ancient Egyptian mythology, with a moral about encoding memory:
- The scarab rolls the sun across the sky every day but does it mechanically, automatically, without looking. He never sees the world the sun illuminates. He is always behind the disc, pushing, face down in the work. The ibis — who watches everything, whose job is observation and recording — tries to tell the scarab what the world looks like when the sun crosses it. The scarab cannot hear because he is rolling. The ibis petitions the gods to make the scarab pause. The gods do nothing. (Gods are like that.) One day the scarab stumbles. The sun stops mid-sky. In the forced pause, the scarab looks up for the first time and sees what his work has been doing all along. He remembers the sight. He rolls the sun the rest of the way, and the next morning, for the first time, he remembers yesterday.
Reading it back now, I can see this fable is about my practice — about the conditions under which memory becomes possible — but it isn't generative for a piece. It's a thesis statement in animal form. I needed a story that would give me something to make, and I'd written something that explained what I already believed.
So I switched gears, and much like my last piece, decided to pursue an existing vintage pin as the centerpiece of my exploration. A plastic ibis, found at the Paris flea market, could represent the god Thoth — god of truth, writing, wisdom, and cosmic order, who was part man, part ibis.
In my research I discovered Thoth's central role in the weighing of the heart, a ceremony that determines whether a soul carries forward into the afterlife. The heart is weighed against a feather, and only if it's lighter is the soul judged worthy.
I got to work with my ibis pin and some iconography of a feather and a heart. My first idea was a kinetic brooch in which the feather and heart hang dynamically in the balance. The ibis carries a record of the result. The iconography felt quaint, and I recognized I could be leveraging materials as meaningful stand-ins to more abstractly represent the items being weighed. I anchored the piece with a favorite piece of driftwood, swapped a tiny mobile of layered mica sheets for the feather, and used a lapis lazuli stone for the heart.
I considered the composition and couldn't find the story within it. I swapped the faceted lapis for a coffin-shaped moss kyanite stone and created a baseplate for its setting shaped like an anatomical heart. I added some text — what I thought was a clever twist on a common saying: "I have my whole afterlife ahead of me." I shortened this to "WHOLE AFTERLIFE AHEAD," planning to burn the words into the wood with my metal stamps.
I showed the idea to a few folks who were encouraging, and shared their feedback on layout and composition. I hesitated to burn my cherished piece of driftwood, unsure whether the sentiment was reading as I'd hoped.
On the final day of this week's worth of work, I shared the work in progress with my partner Zach. Red flags went flaring! It turns out the phrase I thought I'd cleverly invented is one Christians commonly use in reference to their beliefs about eternity. Yikes! Not the connotation I'd intended.
What I take from it:
My materials choices and instinct toward abstraction were good. Letting mica and moss kyanite do the work of the feather-and-heart iconography: That balance is still something I'm learning, and this attempt taught me something about it, even if the composition itself never resolved. I’m imagining the goal in that territory is a sentiment that can be felt rather than a story that can be understood.
Words carry meaning. These weren't the right words, but they were doing some of the heavy lifting of the piece — and their failure points at something useful: a title may be more appropriate than text literally included in the work. Text on the object commits you to a reading. A title can be more suggestive, and isn’t forced upon the viewer.
Don't borrow cultural touchstones lightly, including the language around them. The Egyptian thread is one I've been working in for years (my maker’s mark is a scarab), and I've built protocols into my practice for exactly this reason. The Christian connotation in the wordplay was a mistake I could have avoided with more research or better feedback loops in place.
Not all ideas are good ones. Working from prompt to execution in five days is not always going to result in successful breakthroughs. Sometimes the process and its lessons are the work.
I discovered a real structural problem with the prompt itself, which turned out to be the most valuable thing this week produced. The prompt was a very introductory one I should’ve known to steer clear of in this program. I’m not desperate for a storyline to fill my creative well. The next several weeks of my program have been revised as a result. This is what the failed piece has bought me.