Altars have a extra meaning for me. My workbench is an altar; my desk is an altar. The shelf above my desk is an altar.
There are many more. And yes, they are about the Dead, but they are mostly about weaving Memory and Longing into the present. Much of my artworks are altars. Oh, they just look like chairs, tables, shelves and carvings, but really they function as doorways to and from Elsewhere, to the thin places of imagination and memory. And like all doorways, things can pass both ways.
I put them out there a fragile hopeful declarations of a brief existence and then I wait and learn from my objects and the people who use them. At a funeral, as we grieve the dead, aren’t the tears also for our own mortality, so bluntly confronting us?
Budda is quoted as saying:
Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise.
Altars are the places where this exquisite ambiguity takes place:
Things are dead, and alive.
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