Reliquaries
Made of Stars was created as a response to TELEPHONE - A Global Arts Experiment by Satellite Collective. The project called for me to respond to an artwork by another artist. Celestial visuals punctuated by ethereal sound led me to think about the cosmic cycles of life. I composed this small reliquary piece to try to convey this theme. I chose to enshrine a plastic toy baby above a mineral kit specimen of graphite. The archetypal image of a newborn paired with a fragment of carbon (often said to be “the building block of all life”) suggests the act of creation, connecting human life with the life of the universe. Specifically, the title of the work references Carl Sagan’s quote from the PBS series, Cosmos (1980): “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff."