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a note about the bronze brick on the pedestal called Christina Pettersson's House


A drawing in our culture is partly a record of the past, though it may be a far more personal past than the one of historians. Art acts as a sort of phantom history, whereby a drawn image is a record of ghosts which may or may not have been. After all, a drawing of a brick, no matter how intricately rendered, is still a drawing and not a brick.

All I know is what my own hands can make. To comprehend the past that haunts me with all its separation, I had to make my own brick. I began by building a clay brick using dirt from my childhood home, a house I no longer live in, so that I had to thief the dirt quietly from outside my old bedroom window just as I had done with the bricks. Then I had the brick made into bronze, a mythical transformation in order to physically turn it into the brick that already glowed in my mind like a magic lamp. A bronze brick, a particle born of fire for the future, solid and real. So that someday, if someday ever comes, it will hover within the walls of my own house and become the small cell from which a world will grow.