Over the weekend I bought a little collection of essential art supplies to use in building a reliquary and mockups for a possible giant lawn sculpture of an insect. I do love a well-stocked art store. The thoroughly stoned clerk was amazed when I asked for Fimo clay, as the store has seen little demand for the gummy oven-dry modeling putty. Sculptures rendered in Fimo tend to fall far short of "artistic" quality, possessing a plasticky finish that is nothing like real clay. The consistency is also irritatingly resilient, a little more rubbery than it should be. But Fimo's not bad stuff when you want to crank out some rough sculptural drafts and get the instant gratification of a "fired" final copy right out of your own oven. I once spent hours fabricating small articulated trilobites out of Fimo during a period of fascination with the little prehistoric arthropods. I also made a trilobite pull-toy that was about three feet long. Sometimes I really regret having trashed most of my old artworks before I moved to Senegal.

The reliquary is, as reliquaries are, a place to store souvenir body parts of revered saints. Some real ones are deliciously grisly. In Italy, Susan and I came across an entire room of reliquaries holding everything from single finger bones to extracted teeth to complete skulls. To one side, a little cherub balanced in the center of a glass globe, holding up what looked like a dinner tray in his chubby hands, on which was displayed a graying molar. To the other side, we saw a small forest of reliquaries designed to hold the long bones of the arm, which were fashioned to resemble actual arms with windows in the side through which the bones were visible. Many of these arms featured sculpted hands that were permanently placed in the blessing-giving position, making the whole contraption into a kind of religious prosthesis.

I first begin planning a reliquary over a year ago, when I intended to cast one in bronze. It seems unfair that we should have to die to have our bodies imbued with the kind of raw spiritual power that is held in reliquaries. A great many world religions seem to preach denial of the body, cautioning us against placing our faith in the material world over the formless realm of the spirit. Yet reliquaries exalt the physical remains. In a way, the reliquary stands for a kind of transubstantiation in which perfection of spirit renders the flesh holy as well.

What I really like about reliquaries is that they suggest that people have always been feverish souvenir collectors; long before folks were clipping bits off Elvis' white jumpsuits, we've had a burning need to get our hands on a piece of the things we most cherish. We clench the physical thing before us in lieu of something we desperately want and cannot touch. The fact that people were willing to hack up the bodies of their dead saints and distribute finger bones and extracted teeth just goes to show how we cling to the physical embodiment of hope.

With all this in mind, as well as some other things I've forgotten, I started designing a reliquary to hold my baby teeth. Originally, I considered a receptacle to hold all my fingernail clippings, which I've saved for the past ten years or so for no logical reason whatsoever. But baby teeth are so much more evocative, and somewhere, in my childhood home, there's still a nearly complete collection of my cast-off choppers. Unfortunately, the bronze casting class ended before I good make a good wax copy, and the plan went on the shelf. Now, Fimo in hand, I've going back to make some mockups of reliquaries I might someday build out of more exalted materials.

The giant lawn sculpture idea came about after my mom saw a picture of the new sculpture garden here in DC. One of the featured works there is a giant, gangly spider, so large that one can walk underneath its spindly legs. She loved that spider so much that I thought she might drive up here and attempt to abduct it in her truck. Rather than making a mid-life career change to crime, she broached the idea of requisitioning me to do a large sculpture for her, preferably something arthropodic. Maybe an enormous praying mantis. The Good Ole Boys of Virginia, still perplexed and disturbed by the fact that my mom appears to enjoy life without a husband, would doubtless find some grim amusement in that. I'm giving the giant insect sculpture serious consideration because I firmly believe that there's no art like big art. Also, it might mean that I could do some acetylene torch welding, and there's no art like art that involves welding.

It's been a while since I did more than dabble with making art that I care about. I've missed the way that painting a large canvas made me think with my body instead of my mind. The room in the house that will be a studio is still stacked with boxes from when I moved out of my old apartment and in with Susan. It's slowly being emptied as our possessions integrate throughout the rest of the house, and I anticipate the day when its emptiness begins to refill with something new. A reliquary, of sorts: new flesh on old bones. A new mouth in which to refit those tiny teeth.