I’ve always been drawn to the myths of ancient Greece; they influence so much of the philosophical, psychological, scientific, and artistic narratives that shape our current world view. In an aside in Homer’s Iliad, there’s a cryptic byline about a set of “twenty tripods which … of their own motion could wheel into the immortal gathering*.”

Hephaestus was responsible for all kinds of automata, or self-moving objects, from golden dogs that bite to the bronze eagle that chewed on Prometheus to human statues that feel. But these stood out to me in their poetic ambiguity, their apparent uselessness. There are theories about what the tripods might have held (ceremonial oil, wine, braziers), but none of that is mentioned in the text. These objects live in the borderlands between animate and inanimate, utilitarian and divine, natural and artificial.

I wanted to honor their labor, that useless journeying to and from “the immortal gathering,” by creating my own set of three.

*Homer, Iliad 18. 371 ff (trans. Lattimore)