About the House
The Burning Reliquary is a literary and visual arts house: a home for writing, photography, collected objects, and the histories they carry.
I write as B. Harris. The books belong here, but they are not the whole house. There is also the work I make with a camera, the questions that become essays, and the things I keep looking at long after I first notice them. They do not all need to tell the same story.
Why the reliquary burns
A reliquary preserves what has come to matter. This one burns because preservation does not mean remaining unchanged.
A photograph outlasts the moment it records. A book keeps the marks of another reader. An ordinary object becomes irreplaceable through a history no stranger could see. I am interested in those accumulated meanings: what we inherit, what we choose to carry, and what we eventually learn to set down.
The work gathered here returns to memory, testimony, faith, identity, and transformation. It asks what deserves to remain, without assuming that everything must be kept.
Room for a life
The darkness is not the whole of it.
There is room here for tenderness, desire, humor, and ordinary beauty. A flower does not need to stand for grief. A photograph can matter because the light was worth noticing.
I want the house to grow with the work, leaving space for what I have not made yet. Some things will become books or collections. Others may remain a single image, a poem, or an object with a story worth keeping.
Not everything has to become something larger to belong.