Creating from Destruction--a Moral Dilemma

I've developed a new obsessive habit: I've begun collecting shards of shattered glass off the street. I carry around an empty container whenever I walk anywhere and stop to collect them. There's a lot of it, in a variety of colors and configurations, all over the place. Now that I'm looking for it, I find it everywhere. Anyway, I've been collecting for a week or 2...I sort through the grimy mix, clean off the individual shards, and sort them all by color (there are a surprising amount of variations within the greens, ambers, clears). Here are some photos of the sorting process, just to give you some idea of what I'm talking about:








My initial impulse was to build jagged surfaces with them in a similar vein to what I did with the paper panels (Aggregates) I put in the show. I tried fooling around on some panels:

(The flowers were an impulse focus mechanism)

I still haven't really figured out what to do with them yet--it's been kind of frustrating trying to get the level of volume I was initially looking for--I wanted a really jagged, jutting out kind of effect, but it's nearly impossible to get that with what I have because most of the pieces are pretty small, and I'm not too trusting of gravity in terms of trying to stand things up on their thin edges...

A couple people have suggested I just break my own glass--that that would afford some more control over the kinds of pieces I get (color, size, shape, thickness, etc.). I've thought about this, but I always end up in this weird kind of internal conflict. I'll try to explain...

The way I'm working right now--the process I'm going through is one of seeking out, collecting and building from the discarded fragments of objects that have been broken/ shattered and subsequently forgotten/ ignored/ avoided. I find them beautiful (they glimmer even in the dirt), and clean them up to reinstate and display that beauty in a new creation. It feels like I'm salvaging something--like I'm picking up the pieces and making something positive out of the evidence of these accumulated acts of violence or carelessness. It feels like I'm facilitating the re-realization of the true potential of the forgotten remnants.

I have a hard time contemplating being the actual source of the destruction/ enacting the actual violence that will reduce a bottle or glass or vase or whatever into broken shards. I have a hard time justifying what would be a violent act (even if it's just glass) for what? A sense of control? Power over the unapologetic pursuit of my own personal vision? That starts to feel like sinister territory...

One of the people who brought up the idea of breaking my own glass remarked that what I'm doing now is passive. I suppose, in a way, they're right. Finding already broken pieces of glass is a passive act. I'm sort of using them in a way that allows me to avoid being responsible for how they got broken. I get to be the one who points to their brokenness, acknowledges it, and then uses the pieces toward my own personal vision anyway. So I guess that's sinister in a different way...

But I also feel pretty strongly that being the brutalizer isn't the answer. I think I am active in my seeking and finding and collecting and carefully crafting and building--it's just a different kind of "active". But if I manage to build something that transcends the initial violence involved in what happened before I found the materials, will I have brought about a positive change, or will I have obfuscated that violence? Is the power I exercise through my intuition better than the power I could exercise with a hammer? It certainly feels like a better kind of control than the kind of control that would come from deliberately destroying. It feels like I'm working with the materials, like I'm facilitating a kind of transformation or realization, rather than exerting power over by destroying, brutalizing, shattering. It feels like I'm undoing those kinds of acts instead of perpetuating them.

But if I decided to deliberately break my own glass, knowing that I was taking on the role of the brutalizer, could my own awareness of the shifted tone of that process clarify the violence better than transforming it would? Could my inhabiting of that role somehow serve to raise consciousness rather than perpetuate? I guess it all depends on the ultimate outcome...on what kind of object I ultimately decide to make, or if I decide to make an object at all...I feel like if I were to take on the breaking of the glass, that would have to be the whole piece--just the act of shattering the glass, the futility of it, the lack of necessity or justification or worth in it, the complete pointlessness of destruction. Because how could I justify creating something out of what I just destroyed? How could I ever believe, much less convince others to believe, that it was really necessary or worth it--that the new thing that destruction enabled me to make was so much better and more worthy than that bottle's existence? I suppose I could...but I'd be lying (and I have no intention of ever becoming a politician...)