Artist Statement - Relic

I read somewhere that ancient Celts used to shoot arrows into the sky to insult the gods when things weren't going well. Despite all the rationalizations of our lives, our modern conveniences and contemporary technologies, there are still times when this seems a most sensible response: to blindly fire some arrows at...well, at something. In this sense, my Relic creations have become my arrows, fired when all those digital clocks on the modern appliances consistently read different times even after re-setting, chickens fail to lay eggs after a several of low flying jets go over the henhouse, I have a series of those "it didn't do it yesterday" computer glitches, unreplaceable mechanical parts vanish into domestic black holes and, the worst, what I call the Dominoe Effect, one mistake or technical difficulty snowballs into a dramatically increasing series of catastrophies.

What started as ironic playfulness: the re-spiritualization and re-ritualization of contemporary domestic life, the interweaving of magic and the occult with the mechanical and digital, has had it's unironic rewards. I hang these charms around my home and have even gone so far as to wave the digital wands at my glitching computer. If nothing else, it does make me smile. And like the Vikings who carved the Christian cross on one side of their stone monuments and a tribute to Thor on the other, I like to hedge my bets in case there really is a naughty gremlin playing nasty tricks in my mainframe and not something a $200 an hour programmer is going to have to fix.