 This Little Light of Mine © 1993-lampshade Ginger Henry Geyer © 1997- burning bush telephone Ginger Henry Geyer unglazed porcelain with platinum and gold 7 ½” x 11” diameter "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine,... boom, boom, boom,..." we sang in Sunday School with one finger revolving in the air. "Hide it under a bushel, NO! I'm gonna let it shine!” But if you put a candle under a bush it'd catch on fire. No one explained to me that the bushel was some kind of a ceramic basket used in measurement and as a shade over oil lamps. It wasn't a plant like a dried up tumbleweed. Hence my mix-up with the burning bush and Moses, who was, of course, hiding his light under a bushel when God called. These ideas merged into a poem that I applied to a wayward lampshade. At the time I was into making all sorts of clay hats, so the lampshade represents the hat that only a lusty drunk would wear. Yet the top rim of the lampshade makes a nimbus, a cruciform symbol of redemption. Under the lampshade is a rendition of the burning bush. Initially I made an ugly little orange and green bush that held a candle. A few years later I tried to beautify it by making in into a bowl imprinted with cedar boughs. That one broke as I was showing it to a friend, who quickly stated "maybe the bush does not want to be a bush." Her probe allowed an opening for a new idea which seemed suddenly obvious: the burning bush could be represented by a telephone. After all, it's about the call of Moses. I quickly formed a toy rotary phone, and decided it should bud forth with leaves. I had just picked a few roses outside the studio; their discarded leaves were handy and got imprinted into a thin slab of clay. The phone started getting bushy. In glazing it to look fiery, I realized it was a hot line. My friend's take on this was to declare it a hot line to love, quoting wonderful rose metaphors from William Carlos Williams' Spring & All. The rose connection apparently wasn't as random as I'd thought--I also learned that a Marian legend says the burning bush was a wild rose bramble, symbolizing the purity of she who bore the flames of divine love without being consumed by lust.
My own poem fit around the ribbons on the lampshade. It quotes Hebrews 12:29 and Jeremiah 20:9. Other inspirations include: |
