Soldered brass, 15 x 19 x 12, 2008.
The Junk of the Dead is a ship built out of what the dead leave behind. “Junk” carries both of its senses in the title: the Chinese sailing vessel, and the discarded household goods that outlast their owners. The sculpture is a junk made of junk, and the object is the one pun in its own title. Its sails are battened like a real junk’s and also open like folding fans, so a small personal accessory is enlarged into the thing that catches the wind. A horn rises on a pipe mast over the deck, and a long pole trails from the stern.
The dead have long been supplied with boats. Charon ferries them across the river and takes his fee at the landing, and Egyptian tombs held model boats alongside the goods meant to serve their owners in the next world. Grave goods are what the living send along with the dead. Here the arrangement runs the other way: the belongings are the hull, the rigging and the sails, and the thing carried across is whatever is left once the owners are gone. The vessel has been assembled from a household’s contents after a death, which is what the sale of an estate does to them.
A single bird sits on the foredeck, the only visible crew or passenger. The open bore at the bow looks straight ahead.
