I have been slowly working on this reliquary since October last year. It has been a slow process of working through a lot personally as I work through this piece. A huge thanks goes to Alessandra at Oracle Natural Science for the ethically acquired specimens. She helped me with the beetle, cicada, butterfly, coyote bone, raccoon scapula, raccoon claws, raccoon bones, muskrat tails, and bird talons. Also a huge thanks to my weirdo friends and colleagues at the arthouse who bring me things they know I’ll love, in this case the smaller butterfly, snail shells, honey locust thorns, muskrat skulls, crystals, and many of the beads.
I started this reliquary thinking of ways to honor our connection to Mother Earth, to reflect on my relationship to spirituality, and my Catholic upbringing. I no longer practice Catholicism, but I am a deeply spiritual person and my creative process is central to my spiritual practice. I rely on my creative practice to process my emotions and connect with my inner and outer world. I am so fascinated by ritual and tradition because of my experience growing up Catholic, because of the opulence and reverence of the Catholic church. The visual cultural history of the Catholic church is deeply engrained in my artist viewpoint. Catholic tradition has a lot of morbid yet whimsical qualities, my two favorite things combined. If you ever want to go down a rabbit hole of morbid but intriguing Catholic visual culture just search Catholic catacomb saints or Catholic reliquaries. You’ll find painstakingly bejeweled bones and skeletons behind glass contained in gilded boxes.
I have attempted to translate this devotion into my own spiritual perspective, choosing to honor the gifts of our Earth and the cosmos rather than viewing it from a patriarchal religious hierarchal perspective that places humans above all other creatures on Earth. One of the biggest factors in the destruction of our planet, aside from a few people hoarding their wealth and choosing profit over planet and people, is the concept of hierarchal morality. In this ranking system things are placed above or below others, god being at the top of the hierarchy, humans below, and the rest of the inhabitants of our planet placed below humans. Even within this structure certain humans place themselves above other humans, white Christians above dark skinned Muslims, and even certain creatures above others, dogs and cats above snakes or spiders; operating from a place rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, and classism.
I try to operate from a horizontal morality system, where all living and sentient beings are equal and divinely protected. This system is rooted in matriarchy, in the understanding that our planet is sacred. In this system the focus is on mutual care and support and protecting the most vulnerable: children, animals, the planet. This reliquary is for me a devotion to this idea, the idea that veneration and reverence should not be exclusive to human contributions, especially when many of those contributions are made at the detriment of other life. I carry hope that this idea will prevail, an idea that has been part of human existence for eons longer than the patriarchal hierarchal systems operating in our current times.