Inspired by: Salvage and restoration

The rest of this Inspired by: series may look different than expected. It will be more difficult for me to put into words why the following ideas influence my artwork. However, if I only included visual artists and works in this series, it would be less than accurate.

I’ll start today with the idea of “salvage and restore.”

I come from a line of builders and remodelers on my father’s side. My great grandfather built and remodeled homes. In fact, if I understand correctly, the slab of marble I used in building the pictured coffee table came out of a hotel he worked on. It was, of all things, a urinal divider.

My grandfather was also a builder and did some remodeling, although he spent most of his years working in mills if I recall correctly. And I myself have spent short periods of time working a lumberyard, framing a house, and building cabinets. More recently, I spent 18 months remodeling houses. Most of the houses I worked on were older, some easily approaching the century mark.

At the same time, I was reading through a book titled Heaven by Randy Alcorn. It was a good book, and worked quickly to establish a Biblical theology of Heaven and debunk all of the cartoonish ideas of sitting on clouds with harps, or being greeted at the gate by a sarcastic St. Peter.

But the most interesting idea in the book, for me, was the idea of restoration. Alcorn shows that a proper Biblical theology of Heaven understands that the the earth will be restored. The eternal Heaven in many people’s minds is an ethereal, other-worldy place out in space. Many Christians are under the impression that this world will be completely obliterated.

Alcorn actually points to C.S. Lewis’ classic The Last Battle, part of the Chronicles of Narnia, as an accurate metaphor. In the scene he references, the characters of the book walk through a door, a freestanding door, from the old earth to the new earth. The old earth is covered in water and darkness and the door is shut. The characters are on the same planet, but the world on the other side of the door is new!

The process of restoring a house is much the same. Most of the structure is left in place, but the building gets a new skin and comes out looking new.

I have been further influenced by the idea of entropy, or the idea that everything tends toward disorder — that everything is falling apart. All of this comes together in my mind, and I find myself reflecting on the idea of restoration regularly. Some of my recent projects reflect this in obvious ways.

But my older work included inklings of interest in the idea of restoration as well. Since high school, my collage and mixed media sculptures have included found objects. Some of these objects were gleaned from nature, but many others were manmade. And even though I did not denotatively “restore” these found objects, I put them to new use in a (hopefully) beautiful way.

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