Built from Bullets

Bullet shells, shrapnel and scrap metal–the detritus of war—were well known to be recycled back into arms, but they have also been transformed into art. Since 1971, the artist Al Farrow has been making a unique collection of modern reliquaries from “found materials, mainly guns, gun parts, bombs and bullets.” Reliquaries, long used by other religions as sacred containers for the remains of martyrs, were first adopted by the Christian church in the 4th century. Farrow’s enormous, painstaking works are a sharp commentary on the longstanding, close relationship between war, religion and death. (Also included among them is the diabolically ironic “Vibrator of Santa Guerro,” also crafted from ammunition.) Before Farrow, similar materials were scavenged from the battlefields of World Wars I and II by soldiers themselves, and crafted into works of folk art known as “trench art.” A collection of more than 300 of these, currently on exhibition at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, was made by local artisans, prisoners of war and convalescing soldiers–some with no formal training, others with experience in metalwork. The pieces range from an ashtray made of bullets to a brass artillery shell etched by a Hungarian soldier with the words “Don’t hurt the Hungarians! They don’t hurt anyone!” There’s just something sublime about the idea of a soldier who, idling in a trench, begins to see his ammunition as something creative instead of destructive.