When people ask me what my work is about I often have a difficult time answering them. Sometimes I just say that everything I do is a collage - that I just put things together. How to unravel the thread of my work is difficult and regarding Saint Peter particularly so. My work involves a synthesis of "looking back."

Originality means going back to our origins. - Antoni Gaudí

As a child I read a lot of fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm and H.C. Andersen were my primary teachers. I learned to think in the circle language of fairy stories... or as Mr. Andersen called them, "Wonder Tales."  So, if you will sit back and lend me a bit of your time, I will weave you a Wonder Tale that will explain this work of art I'm now making. I'll do my best to tell the whole story. But, like all good stories, I know it won't be complete - that this story can't possibly be told completely. Nor can it come to an end until long, long after it's completed.

So here's the mystery of it all...

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

                                                                           - Alfred North Whitehead

Sabato (Simon) Rodia

In the early 1980's I went to see The Watts Towers in California. Even though, at the time, they were encased in renovation scaffolding, I was overcome by their majesty - and their humility. I was stunned to learn the story behind this magnificent work of art - that they were made by an illiterate Italian immigrant who worked for thirty years to build them, alone, in an ordinary working class neighborhood, guided mysteriously to engineer them strong enough to withstand earthquakes. That he chose to decorate them with broken tiles and dishes haunted me long after my visit.

About ten years later I began making my large sculptures of figures in elaborate boxes. Many ideas danced before me as wonderful possibilities. One of them was to make a  Neptune in a box reminiscent of the Watts Towers. I remained haunted and ten years passed by.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

I began work on a figure in a box based on my love affair with Russian Constructivism. Now if I was to go off on a tangent down that Rabbit Hole I would never get to the end of this story about Saint Peter and so you will have to just believe that this was also a subject of great magnetic appeal oddly arrived in my mind by some sort of angular inspiration. As part of the piece I searched for something to write on the work itself - a text to write in Cyrillic - for so much of Constructivist imagery appears this way, with those big Russian letters. I read endless tracts about the many committees and theoretical standards and practices that the Revolutionaries believed would foster their new order. But reading them made me rather numb and sleepy.

However, threaded through all that writing, I kept coming across things, bits of advertising jingles and heroic, romantic appeals to the working man, written by a poet named Vladimir Mayakovsky. I was enchanted. And I finally chose his little poem, "But Could You" as a text to sum up the childlike delight of these, mostly young, idealists set temporarily free into a very new world. I remained a fan and began reading about this man who I'd previously only known as a rather scary looking bald gent in a Rodchenko photograph. I learned about his unfortunate story and it helped me to understand a certain pathos regarding that time in history - the first decades of a very turbulent century.

Somehow it occurred to me to change Neptune to Saint Peter - but as a portrait of Mayakovsky. I wasn't sure why but somehow it struck me that Saint Peter began as just a humble fisherman. Poets are gods to the Russian people and Mayakovsky had been fishing for their souls. He wanted to gather their hearts and minds within the net of new hope and possibilities that would be fair and just. The fact that his "futurist" tactics included performing comic-at-heart Vaudeville, with a melancholy streak, in a yellow shirt his mom made for him with a spoon for a buttonier just endeared him to me in a way I couldn't quite care about gods and saints. By association with this emotional showman Saint Peter came down to earth, down from Mt. Olympus, up from the sea and out from behind the Vatican's stony secrets into some sort of perspective closer to the proportions of Groucho Marx or Will Rogers... so that I could take a look at him and consider what he was all about: "Oh, a fisher of men who holds the key to that tenement apartment complex where I hope to end up. Well, I like that guy."

So now I had my actor who would play the part of Saint Peter. And my box would be a tower covered with broken dishes, and now seashells, as well. Oh, and I'd happened upon the most marvelous old nickel plated fish hooks too. Oh, and I was able to purchase an enormous quantity  - a truckload - of antique African seashells that had belonged to a man who had just passed away at the age of 90 in Kingston, NY. How  extraordinary. But the question remained... why? Why make this? What was I doing this for? What was it all about? Just decoration? Whimsy? I kept feeling I was missing something.

Raymond Isadore

Then I went to France. I took the train to Chartres to see the great cathedral. I'd heard about a place in Chartres called Picassette, a house covered in broken dishes. I don't speak French and so I got completely lost and only found it at the very end of the day. What a miracle! This place rivaled The Cathedral for spirit.

Raymond Isadore was a graveyard sweeper in Chartes. But for thirty years he devoted himself to covering every inch of his house with bits of broken dishes he gathered from the garbage. "Pique-assiette" means scavenger. Isadore, a poor, uneducated son of an alcoholic, hated his menial job. But he was a very spiritual man. He decorated his house with religious imagery and a great sense of something beyond the limits of material existence hovers about the narrow pathways and small rooms. This was a work of devotion in which he rose above his earthly state by reassembling bits of refuse into mosaics of the great cathedrals of the world. The entire town of Chartes is represented along one wall with the cathedral at the top. Inscriptions to Mary are written on the walls in bits of former teacups. There, in his tiny house, I honestly felt the presence of God. Isadore had said, "I followed my spirit like you follow a path; it's a narrow path, then it takes you through a small door which leads to paradise." I believed him. He showed me another door to Saint Peter. I realized that this piece had to be dedicated to him, as well.

"The message is so simple that it would seem unimportant to us if we had no notion of the tremendous force of prayer, this mysterious and inexhaustible power which is capable of moving mountains. "  -  Graham Greene

So I began to sense there was something about "the home" in what I was doing by using household dishes as a way to catch fish.

Antoni Gaudí

You forget that I am Spanish and I love sadness. - Pablo Picasso

I have a wonderful friend, a carpenter, named Joseph Mastanduno who out of the kindness of his heart has been helping me build my elaborate constructions. Joseph's skill has made it possible for me to realize some things that might otherwise collapse if left to my limited skills with a hammer. One day Joseph walked in with a stack of postcards. He'd just returned from Barcelona and he brought these back to show me what a man named Antoni Gaudí had built there.

Now, most people consider me a fairly well educated person. But you'd be amazed at the gaps in my patchwork knowledge. I had, erroneously, thought of Gaudí as a 20th artist designer who was pals with all those mad Surrealists running around Europe back then. And so, I was simply floored - and I mean that literally - like weight announcing me to my knees - to learn about this amazing individual and the astonishing work he did way before the Surrealists were even in long pants.

What a colossal visionary! This was clearly the Goya of architects - this driven, devotional man who saw nature in doorways and windows and walls, who drew illustrations of the plastic reality of the spiritual world for us to walk through. Who expressed, through the language of murmuring stone, that glory of human creativity which is art aligned with divine purpose.

In pouring over these images and reading the story of his life I felt drawn in, as if by a secret language I couldn't quite pronounce. But I knew that the great cathedral of La Sagrada Familia was a central element now. That it had to be. That it was something I couldn't ignore. This work, Saint Peter, had to be about the trinity, an elemental "3" and the fragile spiritual harmony of the family. The Nativity facade was the only part of La Sagrada Familia completed by Gaudí in his lifetime. The scale of it is breathtaking. The Holy Family hovers over this cathedral like a credo made visible. He spent 30 years working toward this end. I was staring at "the family," but I wasn't sure why. I at least knew that my "house" for Saint Peter had to be built in homage to this sacred place.

Mayakovsky continued to haunt me. Like an old friend I enjoyed hearing from him and I would occasionally search the web for any new biography. I kept feeling I wasn't getting the whole story about him. I had read about his visit to America for a reading tour in 1926. I also read that he had a daughter by a Russian woman he met here in NYC while on that tour. Something about this seemed quite sad to me. Where was this girl and did she ever know about her father?

One night, unable to sleep, I typed into Google's search box "Mayakovsky's daughter" just for a lark. Lo and behold there she was, Patricia Thompson, a professor at Lehman Collage here in NYC. And she had written a book about her mother and father. Once again, I was  floored! I sent her a letter and shortly afterwards she called me. She told me that her academic specialty was Feminist Philosophy with a focus not on the outer world, which is the focus of so much Feminist attention, but rather on the home, the contemporary struggle of women to hold together their families and their personal identities in this new era of women becoming members of the marketplace. I told her that learning this helped me to justify my turning her father into a "household saint!"

And then the most remarkable thing happened. I went to visit Pat at her apartment. I rang the doorbell and she opened it with a startled look and pointed to her kitchen floor. Apparently, just before I arrived, something had shaken the building - some sort of slight tremor, but just strong enough to shake the kitchen cupboard open, causing some of her mother's favorite dishes to go flying out across the floor, breaking them into pieces. This had just happened and Pat hadn't even cleaned them up yet. We both just stood there. I told her that this portrait of her father was to be built out of broken dishes. So we gathered them up and I carefully carried them home. I am embroidering these precious broken dishes into the costume of the figure of Saint Peter. As a reliquary figure I'm replacing the usual bones of the saint with this touching bone China.

Pat explained to me how her father had become captive within the consuming political nightmare of early Stalinist Russia. Her father had wanted her mother to join him in Russia. But that being impossible, he instead shielded her and her mother from the harm that he believed could easily befall them if their relationship with him had become widely known. It's only been quite recently that Pat has been able to tell her story to a welcoming Russian population eager to correct the tragic incomplete history of one of Russia's favorite sons.  And so, I was finally able to understand the significance of the nativity: that this work could symbolically reunite a broken family through the kindness of recollection that the bones of household dishes could provide.

The Cathedral of Saint John The Divine

I am an old man, poor and ridiculed,

No man that is born will help me

and I have taken on too great a task.

I have sought a vast project in this world

and given many a good example:

I am unloved and unknown.

                                   - Ramón Llull

During this time Mary Jane Brock, of The Big Apple Circus, introduced me to Rev. Tom Miller, at The Cathedral of Saint John The Divine. When Tom saw my work he invited me to exhibit something at The Cathedral. Without hesitation I proposed showing Saint Peter. Tom explained how the Cathedral was begun in the last years of the 19th Century in an effort to honor the many different people emigrating to the United States through NYC. This greatly moved me. My own background, as the grandchild of Italian and Slavic immigrants, is an important part of my work. Just this past spring I visited the Italian village where my grandparents were born in order to obtain my grandfather's birth certificate as part of my application for dual citizenship with Italy. My work is constantly referencing the hardship, labor, steadfast endurance and hope of immigrant and working people.

So it seemed The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine was a house of God built for families - numberless and wearing a multitude of faces. It was built to offer comfort to the many fished out of New York City's harbor for over a hundred years by the welcoming hands of a principle of hope and opportunity that America, and in particular NYC, prides itself as standing for in abundance. It's purpose seemed to feed the many platefuls of the loaves and fishes of God's endless reservoir of faith in rainbow variation on it's central theme: the simple fact of our common humanity.

In order to continue, in kind, this reservoir sensibility within this work I'm asking for donations of broken dishes from individuals - particularly from those living in my Brooklyn neighborhood which still has many people newly arrived from other places. Along with the dish I'm also asking that the donor write their name, and the story behind the dish, down on a small piece of paper, for I'm building this piece to have chambers where, like a time capsule or a reliquary box, these names and stories connected to these bits and pieces of dishware, will be kept as long at this work of art is standing.

We are all God's puppets. - Antoni Gaudí

I consider the four men who have inspired this work as the four apostles who stand beside me in this effort. Each of them struggled in his life and each failed in some fundamental way, as husbands or fathers or members of their communities. At a very human level each had feet of clay. And yet each worked mysteriously, beyond reasonable expectations, seemingly as a form of atonement. The stories of each of these men are full of extraordinary mystical details to which this bit of writing couldn't possibly do justice. But let me just include a few for the sake of the wonder of it all...

• The purpose behind the building of The Watts Towers remains a mystery. But speculation is that Rodia built it to atone for having been a drunkard who abandoned his family.

• Both Raymond Isadore's mother and grandmother were named Mary. And he was born on the day of the Virgin's birth. He also died on the eve of the Virgin's birth, his own birthday.

In his poem, The Cloud In Trousers, Vladimir Mayakovsky refers to himself as Saint Peter:

   Omnipresent, you will be in each cupboard,

      and with such wines we'll grace the table

    that even frowning Apostle Peter

      will want to step out in the ki-ka-pou.

Also, Mayakovsky had originally titled this poem, The Thirteenth Apostle but was forced by the Russian censors to change it under threat of forced labor. I discovered both these facts after having determined that he should be the figure for my Saint Peter.

It is beyond impossible to include all the many mystical facts surrounding Gaudí. His work embraced a symbolic and mythological language of structural puzzles, spatial relationships and even ornamental messages scratched into the decorative tiles of his surfaces. But a few facts seem startlingly relevant:

-  An analysis of the Crypt Güell, a breathtaking masterpiece Gaudí built for his patron, Eusebi Güell, "revealed the presence of thirteen St. Andrew  crosses as symbolic of Christ's life."

-  In 1926 Gaudí was accidentally hit by a tram. Mistaken for a beggar he was taken to a dispensary for the poor where he died. It was located on the Ronda de Sant Pere.

No archetype can be reduced to a simple formula... It is a vessel which can never empty and never fill...it persists through the ages and requires interpreting ever anew. - Carl Jung

Science is a hamper which is being filled with things and more things that no one can manage until Art puts handles on the hamper and takes from it exactly what is necessary to perform the deed. - Antoni Gaudí

This work, Saint Peter, is really all about the work which preceded it: my unfinished work about Quantum Physics and the synchronistic nature of time called, The Ghost of Change. When Saint Peter is completed I will once again pick up where I left off. But actually, Saint Peter is part of The Ghost of Change.  It has been a demonstration for me of the thesis that The Ghost of Change proposes, which is that everything goes in a circle, in a handshake and a bond of kinship that stretches beyond material time and the language of doubt and simple speculation. And that like a child in a fairy tale we can only let the ball of yarn forever roll away - forever and forever and forever - from our efforts to hold onto it. That's the only way we can find our way to anywhere we might call home. I know that Saint Peter knows this already and is only waiting for me to catch up.

- Chris Piazza