I.
Sides spliced and shorn and riven four-ways,
Eggshell skin dotted with deposits, (dust motes
Caught and frozen by the wide, wet brush),
Plinth 17-A is released from its
Arrested composure—pared and stacked
And sutured with care.

Geriatric bones hugged tightly in place
By shiny new joints—machinic secretions,
Hardened in increments, plastic wet
And white as snow—they hold the walls
Out at an inch’s eighth, hardly touching
Yeld held fast, as if
In halted explosion.

The genetic code of its nodal forms scripted
In transparent vials, its sibling a functional clone—
Token of a token of a type.
Modal model of intelligent re-use,
Will sleep folded in the storeroom;
Live forever in the airy archive above.

II.
But still those prisms of function are yet
Objects of fetish! Prized for their unassuming
Elegance and designed to forget
Their very making, the humble plinth
Asked kindly to erase itself
From the room.

Asset to the gallery and burden
To the UHaul! What nagging expense to the
Unfortunately funded! Stubbornly ignored,
Simply use and re-use and retire
On costly, cumbersome loop.

O, to be freed from your mandate of
Seamless sleekness! Able to collapse, at last,
To sustain; its configurations
Uninhibited from inhabiting
Any exhibit at all—plinth 17-A
Bravely bares its pulpy seams;
Scars of reconstruction.

III.
Cannot a tool be but a tool, without
The added weight of blind tradition?
Can we not admit that everything
Worth presenting needs propping up;
That genuflecting legs have costs, take space,
break down as often as they stand?

Or are they more equal—the holder and the
Held—than convention allows?

Deployed behind glass, 17-A
Basks in its last days before disassembly.
Deep in the curatorial basement,
Its successors collect patient dust.
Rows upon rows of alabaster blocks
Stand waiting.
Proud tombstones
In the dark.

Artist’s statement:

I wrote this poem after attending a talk by Arrien Weeks at FOFA’s 2025 undergraduate student exhibition, manifesting gardens. His Modular Plinth project is part of the gallery’s ongoing investigation into sustainable curatorial practices. The prototype—affectionately referred to as plinth 17-A—was featured in the exhibition’s glass showcase supporting a part of Gemma Stevens’ artwork, “From Beneath, Towards Silence.”

Since many of the plinths kept in the gallery’s storeroom were out of commission or in need of repairs, Weeks saw an opportunity to repurpose the existing stock to be eco-friendly and low-waste. The modular plinth consists of plywood planks secured by 3-D printed plastic joints, meaning it can be disassembled, compactly stored, and easily transported. In addition to sustainability, Weeks’s project is invested in accessibility. The model files are open-source, and free to use for any artist or gallery looking for a more practical solution to presenting their artwork. This is especially helpful for spaces with limited storage, tight budgets, or mobility needs. The modular plinth supports a vision of necessary materials circulating within and between communities with minimal waste and few technical barriers. It also fits into broader discussions about the return of lending libraries post-pandemic, and the promise of communal ownership as a sustainable curatorial practice.

When I attended Weeks’s Lunchbox Talk, I was struck by his determination to “challenge to traditional gallery aesthetic.” I had not considered that heavy, expensive, or brand new plinths might be a conventional sign of status that certain galleries would not be willing to surrender—no matter how practical the alternative. I started to think about how plinths have been largely invisible to me, despite their literally foundational role to systems of artistic presentation. After hearing Weeks thoughtfully describe his process, I started to play with different methods of expressing this paradox.
In the end, it had to be the ode. The form’s associations with exaltation and reverence, often of a physical object, made it the perfect vehicle to push back against precisely those impulses that lead us to fetishize functional objects. It was also a playful choice to direct attention away from the art object—like Keats’s canonical Ode to a Grecian Urn—and towards the material scaffolding without which that poem never could have been written. Using a classical Pindaric structure of a strophe/antistrophe/epode to demarcate an invocation, reflection, and resolution, Ode to the Modular Plinth explores how a piece of functional furniture becomes loaded with meaning, and how we might start to untangle that meaning to free ourselves from unhelpful conventions of style and form. Ultimately, the ode presents the modular plinth as an art object in its own right, as worthy of exaltation as the sculpture which sits atop.