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One of my favourite artists Patricia Piccinini explores „otherness“, or „sameness“, depending on which way you look at it, in uniquely visceral sculptures. For the virtual exhibition Breathblooms and Lighthavens she worked for the first time with glass blowing at a residency at Canberra Glassworks. Piccinini herself said of this experience:

“I have wanted to work with glass forever, and these new sculptures are a wonderful opportunity for me to explore its elemental materiality. The fecund imagery of seeds and blossoms is played out against the paradoxical transparent solidity of these amorphous objects. These are objects that suggest the beginning of something, forms caught in the process of coalescing, animated by breath but frozen in the moment.”

The fascinating novel Breath by Michael Symmons Roberts reads less of a story to me than a series of juxtapositions of once-in-a-lifetime experiences: a father loses a son in an accident, an elderly man waits for a lung transplant and a pilot is on her first solo organ transport flight across an unspecified war torn country. Even though the events unfold mostly in chronological order – with intermittent flashbacks – we often don’t quite know where we are, which character’s world we enter with each new chapter, which side of the country we’re in – the North or the South – and yet, it all seems disturbingly familiar. And thus, as we do in our own lives, we pick up the clues and figure things out as we go along.

The breath and its organ, the lungs, appear in many interesting forms, for example when the father looks at his dead son’s body, wondering if “he should place a hand on the lung and press it, pushing out the last breaths.”, while the elderly man is “dragging at the air to recover his breath”. And during the transport flight, the pilot imagines hearing the preserved lung of the boy speaking, “Maybe this is the vestigial voice of the boy, a residue of his voice lodged in his lung.” 

In “Bart sells his soul”, episode 4, season 7 of  The Simpsons, Bart has played a prank on the minister of the church by exchanging the hymn sheet with a Rock’n’roll sheet. The minister threatens all the boys in the choir with damnation etc. if no one comes forward with the person responsible for the prank. Bart’s friend Milhouse outs him. An argument follows about whether or not there is such a thing as the soul and therefore damnation. Bart states that the soul doesn’t exist and agrees to sell his soul to Milhouse – or rather whatever Milhouse believes to be Bart’s soul – for five bucks. The boys run to the ice-cream parlour where Bart’s ideas about the soul are unexpectedly challenged:

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