This is all that is left of a rather elaborate piece of art that I created as my last project in sculpture. We were supposed to make a piece around the idea of shrines. I remembered back to my art history class and to various world religions. There is a precedent for using fire as a form of renewal. Many cultures burn offering to the gods, or, closer the the idea I hoped to capture, they would burn objects that would represent desires, hoping that this action would bring their requests closer to the gods. They might wish to bring something closer to them, wealth or prosperity, or banish something away from them. Throughout many cultures across the world fire is closely linked to rebirth, renewal,and purification, and we have many myths that spring from this idea. Another inspiration came from a shrine in Japan, the Ise Shrine, which is ritualistically destroyed and rebuilt every twenty years. So I designed and built a little papercraft Japanese style shrine. I covered it in memories of my past... text from emails, IMs, handwritten excerpts from my journals... a lot of luggage that I had been carrying around. Then I took it to class and burned it. It was surprisingly relieving, I honestly thought it would be a more empty, aesthetic gesture, but it really got to me. I had some pictures of the shrine itself on a cellphone that subsequently got destroyed, but perhaps it is better that way. I guess that brings us around to this little red thing. This is the clay effigy I placed in the shrine, the only thing left to show it ever existed, literaly rising from the ashes of the great fireball (seriously, huge ball of flame) that was my art project.

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