Peter’s New Ears, found cement rabbit, ink, string, balsa wood, turntable, 2007

I need to tell you the background story about this piece. When I met Jerry, who became my husband, I had already experienced a little hearing loss, but it really wasn’t very bad. After we had only been dating a little while, I had an episode of worsening and my hearing got quite a bit worse. I got scared that I might go completely deaf, might not be able to continue to do my job, etc., etc., so I tried to break up with Jerry – for his own protection, I always hasten to add. He refused to be broken up with and reminded me that his father sustained severe hearing loss, as well as losing an eye, in World War II and that his hearing mother and hard-of-hearing father got along just fine all those years and it would not be a problem for us, either.

So, the break-up didn’t stick and we were married about a year after that. One of the first gifts Jerry gave me after we married was a cement bunny rabbit for my garden. 

One night a couple of years later we had a big storm and the huge old elm tree in our front yard broke and came crashing down on the house. It did some damage and there was a big mess to clean up. When we cleared away the debris, we saw that a branch had knocked the ears off my cement bunny, which I thought was proof that God does have a sense of humor. I set the damaged bunny with the other broken things to be hauled off to the dump.

A week or so later I noticed that the bunny hadn’t gone to the dump and was sitting back by the garage. I told Jerry that it was fine to throw away the bunny, since it was broken. Jerry just muttered something about being kind of attached to the old bunny and I noticed he never moved it back to the throwaway pile.

Finally I realized that Jerry just could not bring himself to throw something away just because its ears were broken.

I decided the bunny had earned its right to immortality and should live on as art and it became the piece you see pictured above. The idea is that the bunny wants to hear and has clothed himself in the words of hearing (all the expressions I could think of referring to the act of hearing, inscribed in India ink in a spiral around the bunny’s body) and fashioned ears for himself of balsa wood and string.

I call the piece Peter’s New Ears and coincidentally, the surgeon who gave me my cochlear implants was Dr. Peter Roland.

Dr. Sarah Rose is Director of the Disability Studies Minor at The University of Texas at Arlington and was on my MFA Committee. She also became a close personal friend as well as my Supervisor when I was fortunate to get to teach some classes for the Minor. She seemed to especially like this piece and I asked her if she would like to have it for her office. The last time I visited, Peter was still there, residing happily on her windowsill.