This little strange piece I made for the MORTAL show but decided against exhibiting. It would have been eclipsed by 'the a game', sending out an even more confused message than that deliberately polyphonic, encyclopædic folly does on its own. The fragment of bone is from my mother's medical school skeleton. I don't know if it is still the case, but when my parents were at medical school in London each student had two skeletons; their own and another. All that remains of my mother's is a mess of bones in a white plastic bag, missing most parts but with some curious additions. How does one acquire a spare jaw?If respect even comes into it, is using a part of some unknown body to make a work of trite art worse than leaving it in a bag? Somehow I couldn't bring myself to set scalpel to that fragment of spongy bone. Somehow I ended up shaping it with my teeth, picking at it with my nails as if it were part of my own body. How small a part of someone is taboo? Some cells are more sacred than others, even now. Eggs and seed. The chest was already broken, using it was a little step.
