I had a weird idea last week. We were driving home from Phoenix and I was staring out the window, thinking. It is finally Spring and, sadly, I was noticing all the animals that had been killed - some recently while scampering recklessly for food or sex or the hysteria of a full moon, others from a while ago, caught in a storm and buried under snow, just now revealed.
I also noticed all the garbage and car parts that had collected over the winter. Torn off tire treads, smashed plastic and metal, bags and household items that had flown off in the wind, look like the excrement of the giant mechanical creature that is our system of transportation.
As we whizzed by, I realized that it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between the natural and the mechanical corpses. It gave me the idea to do a series of sculptures that would be a statement on the cold, callousness of what we glibly refer to as "road-kill".
I think it would be a very macho project and I am not sure I have the stomach or the arm strength to do it. But, someone could collect scraps of tire, car parts, etc.; bones, pelts, and antlers; and combine them into sculptures of animals. Without being violent about it, they could show the animal lying down. They could sculpt and sew the pieces of cloth and rubber into a kind of stuffed animal.
I always say a prayer when I see an animal dead on the road or the side of the road. Sometimes see small white crosses stuck in the berm off the road commemorating where a human has died and I say a prayer for them too. It is a remnant of my catholic upbringing - a nice one, I think. It makes me remember that we are all part of a family on Earth and that our techno-industrial world has to be a help to the natural world, not it's antithesis or enemy.
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