A Study of Instability

For weeks, my daughter carried around this piece of art she was making.

At the core of the piece was an old jewelry box filled with small stones which she had taped shut, painted, and decorated with a random assortment of sparkly things. This was ostensibly going to be a rattle–a gift she was making for my friend’s newborn.

But the longer she hung on to this thing, the more she added to it.

Bits of cardboard and tissue paper were taped on and then quickly covered by layers of some frilly material which were, themselves, soon covered by more cardboard and tissue paper. A small note for the baby–dictated by my daughter and transcribed by me–was accidentally covered during these iterative improvements, resulting in a fit of tears until I promised to rewrite the note word-for-word, exactly as it had been.

By the end, the piece had completely lost its meaning and function as a rattle–it was just this bloated shapeless mess of materials that was endlessly coming apart under its own weight. And, because she had spent weeks constructing this thing–an eternity in 4-year-old time–whenever the scotch tape inevitably failed somewhere it was a traumatic event for the poor kid.

And it struck me how much of adult life is contained in this strange childhood episode, how universal and relatable is this tendency to drown ourselves in unnecessary complexity, to loose sight of the reason we started doing something in the first place, to carry burden upon burden until the load becomes unstable and precarious and impossible to balance. I thought back on my own adult life: the sacrifices I had made for a career I didn’t want, the nerve endings I had fried to salvage a toxic relationship. There’s a strange tendency to justify these kinds of decisions by the efforts already expended, as if the sunk cost somehow makes continued investment any less absurd.

When I composed this image, I had at the forefront of my mind the idea of instability.

Instability is a very common theme in classical still life, often implicit in the precarious placement of items near table ledges, and it is typically meant to remind the viewer of their own tenuous grasp to life. Here, I make these themes explicit through the inclusion of unsubtle reminders of mortality: gore and severed animal heads. But the themes are no less present in classical “breakfast table” still life arrangements or, for that matter, in that strange and purposeless creation of cardboard and lace and sparkling paints that my daughter carried with her tirelessly, even as it came undone in her hands.