A Vision Was Born (In a Garden, Between Sips of Lemonade)
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon at the annual weekend garden party — the kind where the guacamole runs out too fast and someone always brings up crypto. Abi, our aspiring artist and sculptor extraordinaire, had been waiting for this moment all week.
Her friend Sonia Law — a woman whose idea of “avant-garde” is ordering oat milk in a French café — was visiting from out of town. Abi wanted desperately to impress her. Not with food, not with conversation, and certainly not with her Spotify playlist (which hasn’t been updated since 2019). No — Abi was going to unleash her artistic genius.
The Masterpiece
Behold: two pieces of rotten wood, recovered from the bottom of a firewood pile that even the termites had abandoned. Abi saw what none of us saw — potential. Where the rest of us saw “kindling that smells weird,” Abi saw “Untitled #7 (Decomposition as Dialogue).”
She spent four hours arranging them on a table. Four. Hours. She rotated the left piece eleven times, the right piece fourteen times, and at one point stepped back, squinted, and whispered, “It’s speaking to me.”
The wood said nothing. The wood has been dead for three years.
The Critics Weigh In
Sonia, to her credit, tried. She really tried.
“Oh wow… it’s very… textural. Is the… decay… intentional?”
“Intentional?” Abi beamed. “It’s the whole point, Sonia. It’s a meditation on entropy and the futility of permanence.”
Sonia nodded slowly, the way you nod when someone tells you their cat is a Reiki healer.
The only other person who commented was Gary from next door, who wandered over to ask if anyone had a corkscrew. He looked at the sculpture for approximately four seconds and said, “You know that’s firewood, right?”
The Aftermath
As of press time, the sculpture remains on the garden table, where it has attracted:
- Zero gallery invitations
- Zero commissions
- One confused squirrel
- Three ants who appear to have moved in permanently
But Abi? Abi is thrilled. She’s already planning her next piece: a found-object installation called “Broken Umbrella #2 (Storm as Metaphor),” which is literally just a broken umbrella she found near the bus stop.
Sonia has not returned any of Abi’s texts since the party. She did, however, send a single 👍 emoji three days later, which Abi has screenshot and framed as “endorsement from the art establishment.”
The art world can sleep soundly tonight. Abi is not coming for it.
But she is coming for that broken umbrella.