Make the Devil Cry

The works in this series offer a form of mourning; their creation is an act of grieving.  They acknowledge that there has been more pain and cruelty in the world than has ever been mourned.  It is a mourning of violence and of those taken from others by cruel or unnatural means—unnatural force and unnatural circumstance.  It is a mourning, foremost, for those who have had to bear the violent taking of others, and whose grief for those lost has kept their own state from being adequately mourned.  The twentieth century has seen more grief than can be absorbed in loving the living—it spills over between generations.

Most of these works incorporate the body in a physical capacity, using bones and animal remains, or parts of the body that have not been entirely decimated.  These are remnants only, as the body has been violently torn.  Though the physical body here refers to the corpus unto which violence has been inflicted, this violence might just as readily have been done to the spirit.  These works may mourn crushed spirit more than loss of life or limb.

Where bones are used, they have been carefully arranged, marked, or processed.  This refers both to pragmatic utility and to cathartic ritual.  The dead are not bothered by the condition or arrangement of their bones, but the idea of this arrangement can have a significant impact on the living. 

Other materials here refer less explicitly to the body; tumbleweeds are symbols of desolation, and are skeletons, really—like bones.  The thistle withers and dies, never having been a beloved plant, and its tumbleweed skeleton haunts fencelines and the open range.  To pair this with long, hollow, ghostly gloves suggests a sort of functional wandering—perhaps the hands no longer know what to do, and have wondered for so long that their thistle has died, leaving the hands to wander and uselessly haunt.  Or, perhaps the cloth and wax stitched around the tumbleweed become an attempt to reconstruct the body onto its skeletal remains.

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