Numinous came to an artistic demise on Halloween. Destruction as art? As ceremony? Never gave it a thought. Until yesterday.

I received a call from the Spurgeon Art Gallery, with a request from a group of CWU choreography students. They wanted to create a performance of dancing in the strands. Yes, yes and yes! What a beautiful way to end the reign of this art installation.

What usually happens to my work at the end of an exhibit? People ask the question a lot. They want to believe it has a second life. It doesn’t. As highfalutin as it may sound, here’s why.

The hot glue installations are site-specific, and are philosophically and conceptually grounded in ideas about the transitory nature of all things. They’ve come function as vestiges of my personal journey though of time. Re-purposing them doesn’t feel right.

So the work is destroyed once the exhibit is over. The wire leads are snipped from the ceiling grids, and the piles of drizzled hot glue are swept up and compressed into a couple garbage bags.

Not unlike the way Tibetan monks work an ungodly amount of time to perfect sand mandalas, then ritualistically destroy the art after they’re complete.

It’s a might hard practice of learning to let go …