God Created birds and built tree but man built cages.

This work is centered on the attempt of humanity to be free and control it existence, the desire of man to create a world based on his ideal, passion and dreams which in some cases turns around to work against him…

We have built illusions and dreams beyond true freedom; we are losing values and morals by the seconds, we have created illusions and dreams that will continue to elude us, separate us, alienate us, destroy and kill our sense of humanity.

We have caught ourselves in our own webs, webs of drugs, prostitutions (child prostitution and trafficking) abortions, rapes, social unrest, environmental pollutions, global warning, cultural conflicts and social irresponsibility, political crimes, economics power tussle ( globalization ).

We fight more wars than ever before, we work hard than before, know more now than before. Knowledge and information are in full circulation than ever before, yet true knowledge has eluded us, the more we search the less we know.

True knowledge is true love for self, true love is divine, divine is perfection, perfection is God, true revelation is beyond knowledge, it is true surrender to the unmoved mover.

It is an installation piece, when assembled it will create a rectangular box that stands 203.2 cm tall and 104.14cm x 99.06 cm width.( Square). It has inscription from the book of Ecclesiastics and an extract from my poem...The Quest, ( Nduwhite Ndubuisi Ahanonu 2007unpublished). Etc.

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all ; yea ,also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil , and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead…then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes. 9 : 3

Mankind is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source,

Broken from the source,

In search of independence,

Blinded in knowledge,

Free in ignorance…( The Quest, Nduwhite Ndubuisi Ahanonu 2006.Unpublished)

The cage is bearing birds making attempts to escape, the birds represent the natural things and Gods gifts to man to explore instead we choose to exploit them.

On top of is a picture of the Vitruvian man, drawn by Leonardo Dan Vinci in 1490,it was first of all a theory propagated by Marcus Vitruvius, a Roman Architect in 1 BCE. He authored this treatise on architecture entitled De Architectura.

This famous drawing of Leonardo confirmed the theory of Marcus that man is the balance and the center point of the earth as quoted in the beginning of book III, in his discussion on the building of the temples:

Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man can be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it…
(Marcus Vitruvius, De Architectura, Chapter 1, p 3)

It is from here that the concept of the vitruvian man emerged, Leonardo’s drawing that provided the first drawing of human proportion supports Marcus treaties of balance and man… Here he provides one of his simplest illustrations of a shifting ‘centre of magnitude’ without a corresponding change of ‘centre of normal gravity’… i.e., the centers of ‘magnitude’ and ‘gravity (Keele 252).”

While the Encyclopedia Britannica online states that Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through his anatomical drawings and Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). He believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe."

If as a argued above that man is the cosmography of the microcosm, then what ever we do here reflects on the balance of the earth.( Nature) the human body is a symbol of the essential symmetry , and by extension , of the universe as a whole.

So our world survives essentially by what we do and when we do them, on a close study of the vitruvian man, I believe that a triangle can be created from the wide spread hands to the tip of the closed legs…giving us a sense of balance like a drawing of food chain, the trinity and the pyramid of Egypt an ancient architecture of human wisdom beyond the physical purpose of sheltering but prolonging.

So if a triangle stands for us a source of divinity, human relationship in a symbiotic community and ecosystem in a balance, was Marcus and Leonardo leaving an invisible line for our generation to discover…and that I have come to the enlightenment of the Triangle…just like a touch light, creates a triangle as it travels…I have seen the triangle in the light.

And if i say today, that this same treaties has represented for us a lot than we have closely observed…and that today I have discovered the invisible lines in Leonardo Dan Vinci drawing of the Vitruvian man as a triangle that balances all things.

As renaissance enough as this was it still has it contemporary representation in the major discipline of man.

In medicine, is symbol used by medical professional in United States, Saudi Arabia India and Germany…it also represents alternative medicine and the holopathic approach to wholeness.

Economic Influence: The Italian 1 Euro coins…chosen by Carlon Azeblio Ciampi because of it high symbolic meaning of “man as a measure of all things”

Scientific Pursuit: It appears on the patch on the suit worn on the right shoulder of the American Extravehicular Mobility Unit ( EMU) used by NASA and as a patch of honour, called the EVA patch, awarded to spacewalkers for use on the uniform jumpsuit as an indicator that the individual has completed a spacewalk.

Even in technological products like Mac Os representing accessibility and gnome desktop computer interfaces.

We should not be in a hurry not to notice the picture of the earth below the Vitruvian man…I am seeking to provoke response and the consciousness of mans regarding his activities, what we do and how we do them affects our world…if the earth hangs on a balance on man…then I believe that if we go back to the drawing board, to the blue print, we may be able to save our dying world. Today we are faced with all kinds of challenges , i.e. ; Global economic meltdown, global warming, shocks and waves of technological demands, increased demands of energy and alternative energy , deforestation; depletion of energy and natural resources resulting to breakdown in the food chain (may I remind us of the pyramid for preservation in Egypt and that the same principle was used to preserve groundnut in Kano years back, so what with the triangle? ), deforestation, and the sea over flowing it boundaries i.e. Lagos Bar beach.

Finally, the tree in the middle represents nature and man’s gift, just as Albert Einstein once said “all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward enabling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom” and yet we have caged ourselves in our pursuits…we must turn to the blue print, to nature and seek the true way to exist.

Nduwhite Ndubuisi Ahanonu

2010