Kuwait Preserved

 

Two weeks after the 1991 Gulf War ceased, among fields of burning oil wells, a little purple flower bloomed, pushing its way through the soot-covered, Kuwaiti desert sand. The flowers were evenly distributed a few feet apart in all directions. A natural history of trial and error sculpted this flower to persist here. Ambivalent toward our dirty little war, blackened with burned oil and littered with rusted exoskeletons of tanks, and military vehicles of all kinds, those seeds proceeded to march in their own time. As a reminder to us of the common destiny of all living things, they sprouted, bloomed, and withered away.
 
The sculpture consists of painted steel flowers supporting a large specimen jar. Inside the jar are two scorpions, one camel spider, and the Kuwait Liberation Medal, all of which I acquired in that desert, preserved in isopropyl alcohol.