This Mortal Coil – 27″ x 31″ – bedspring, oxygen tubing, linen thread, beads, black pepper, oregano and yarrow flowers, paper clips, wire, pyrite, mirrors, dollar bills, frankincense oil, can tops, chain mail – Lent, 2010
Last week began the season of Lent, the period of preparation for Easter, characterized partly by silence and self-examination. This year I’ve been pondering the topic of attachment, which became the subject of my Lenten piece of art.
There are so many things in life that I am attached to; some healthy, and some not so healthy. When I become very attached to something, whether it is a person or an idea or a situation, there is a danger that it will slowly start to usurp the place of God in my life. This can be quite subtle, but eventually I will find myself forgetting that the Lord should be the center and foundation of my life. The result will be like friction that unbalances a gyroscope, with my life trying to revolve around something impermanent and unstable.
Attachments bear examination even in less obviously spiritual areas of our lives. For instance, as adults, many of us are pretty attached to being competent and knowledgeable, and this might keep us from learning new things or being open to new experiences. Our homes might be more cluttered than necessary because we are attached to a bunch of stuff that we don’t really need.
In the last six months, I’ve had to give up a few things I was pretty attached to, including a relationship with a partner of several years, a very cute little pickup truck that I only owned for two weeks before totaling it against a telephone pole, my near-perfect attendance record at work, and most notably the presence on the planet of my father, who was very dear to me.
Letting go of attachment to something you no longer have is one thing, but an even bigger challenge may be how to have the things we do have, without attachment to them distracting us from our real purpose.
I have been wanting to make this piece of art for several years. A friend who saw its possibilities gave me the piece of bedspring, and right away I knew it would make a piece for Lent, and I would call it ‘This Mortal Coil.’ Because how could I resist the pun? And it is such a wonderfully entangled object, with different wires and coils intertwined together. It’s a little hard to distinguish what’s going on in the photograph, but there are various things mounted to it, some to represent particular types of attachments, and some just because they seemed like a good idea at the time. The vertical lines are made with dollar bills cut into ribbon. The wavy horizontal lines are oxygen tubing that my dad, who was on oxygen for the last couple months of his life, gave me to play with. (some of the tubing is filled with pepper, and some is filled with purple beads.) There is some chain mail, to represent the desire to be safe and protected, and mirrors, and paper clips, and a nice chunk of fool’s gold I found in my bead box.