The Scavenger

For 'The Scavenger' I was working toward a theme that permeates a lot of my work, which can roughly be phrased with the question: "what is our relationship to progress? Whether by the progress of technology, the evolution of philosophical thought, the changes in tradition, or the cycle of death and birth, what is the human feeling toward this state of seemingly endless entropy?."

In order to explore this question I have a figure, but not quite a human. Perhaps something technologically derived, or perhaps a perversion of the biological. Tubes and wires spill from exposed regions of unnatural anatomy. Dark gears protrude from the vertebral column. The figure crouches like an animal amidst the bones and detritus of a dark space, both natural and unnatural. Worn on the head, or perhaps instead of a head, the figure has a headdress evoking the silhouette of a bird of prey, with a sharp hooked beak. The tradition of the headdress is one of transformation; to turn the wearer into something not quite human, a spirit or an animal. But this headdress is not traditional. It is eyeless, mouthless, wrought from dark metals and connected via tubes or wires to something out of frame. Perhaps this headdress is not a source of power as in times past, but a yoke conferring control to some unseen manipulator? And yet, upon the back of this unnerving figure, which is beautiful but somehow twisted, there is inscribed the Babylonian symbol for the tree of life. For if this is indeed a scavenger, an eater of the dead, then it too is part of a cycle of life as is death. To scavenge, to scrape and scour, is to recapitulate life... to reinvest with purpose those things and beings which have lost theirs.

That is what humanity does and will continue to do. It warps itself into a patchwork amalgam by scavenging parts and pieces of its past and rebuilding itself in the present. Some pieces are natural and others are technological, cultural or societal, so that we emerge as something not-quite-human and never entirely sure if we are truly the beings controlling the process of our own perpetual cycle of rebirth, or where our real humanity begins and our self-inflicted artifice ends.