The moment I saw the modern steam iron Eamonn Magee brought in I knew what it had to be. Some objects suggest their future form before any thoughts or reasoning has time to enter into the process, almost as if they knew it themselves, and just need to tell me.

doesn't look like a monument of the industrial age, but it is

The shape was is the design of the lower steam generating body of the iron. Personally I can’t understand how anyone can use the iron without seeing the angry God hiding inside it, but then again, an iron is such a mundane and practical objects that most people wouldn’t look for faces in it.

but why is he angry?

Erecting the numerous, very imposing stone Moai along their coastline finally broke the spine of the ancient Easter Island economy after a long period of  growth and expansion. As beautifully described by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, it is likely that the Easter islanders killed themselves off with their excessive statue building, cutting down the precious few trees on the island to make rollers for transporting the heavy stone Moai from the quarry to the coast. Surely they were not aware of what they were doing to themselves. Cutting down a few trees to roll the first statue down to the sea can’t have seemed particularly wasteful, and when they cut down the very last tree for the same purpose, they had slowly gotten used to an environment with many statues but with fewer trees, and probably never thought much of it. It was their doom however, as fertile top soil eroded away without the protection of tree roots, and their agricultural economy collapsed into starvation, war and cannibalism. Are we going the same way? Are all the practical plastic apparatuses we surround ourselves with our very own Moai? Will future archaeologists be baffled by a people who replaced their natural living environment with heaps of infertile rubbish, or will we change before it’s too late this time?

the face of our true God?

Object no. 39