Lost at Sea

This is another in my 'Garden Sculpture' series, created with cast pumice and cement, with glass and metal components. Some pieces, like this one, are not suited for year round exposure to the elements, but could be outside, if sheltered from direct rain or snow. This one is serving as a 'side table' in our foyer presently, adding some ambient light with its internal lighting. See more pieces on my website!

As a lament for lost ideals, 'Lost at Sea' includes images from past civilizations and a representation of our own culture's slide into the abyss of lost direction.

The white glass pieces with engraved 'runes' (from a forgotten Scandanavian culture) and the pyramid forms (from the long past Egyptian civilization) represent past times and lost ideals. Carved into these pyramidal forms are three concepts that have been abandoned by our grasping and gasping post-post-industrial culture:

-Eros: (represented by a mermaid) The loss of appreciation for the mythical, mystical, exotic and erotic, debasing these human drives in xenophobic and pornographic distortions.

-Justice: The 'balance' of right action, right thought and right emotion has been lost in economics, ecology and the social connection of all humanity.

-Chaos: (represented by a cumulonimbus cloud of life giving rain (and sometimes life threatening force). The loss of the humble appreciation that we cannot know and control all things from the limited knowledge of our materially based cultural constructs.

The damaged boat form represents our own 'lost' culture. sunken to the depths with its hubristic adherence to the concept that through technology we can re-shape the natural world into a better one. Embedded in this form is the 'ladder to success' intertwined with the 'snakes of unknowing' that slither among those aspirations, with unanticipated consequences that ultimately lead to our own destruction. All this set on a bed of sand: our own culture's unstable foundation of inequality and voraciousness.