Legacy Canticle - Rod Lathim

“Legacy Canticle”

Deconstructed cello, vintage wood gear mold, vintage objects, beaded neon

52” T x 18” W x 17” D (without pedestal)

Legacy Canticle is a deconstructed vintage cello opened into eight floating fragments, as if the instrument has been gently unsealed—made transparent—so its inner life can be witnessed. Set upon a vintage wooden mold once used for an industrial gear, the work bridges two forms of rhythm: the turning of machinery and the turning of generations… an altar of turning, a foundation of rhythm. 

Inside the cello’s opened body, a hidden world lives—an intimate constellation of ephemera suspended like memories held in the resonant chamber of the heart. Photographs become ancestral voices. Clockwork becomes the pulse of time. A ruler bends like the measure of lived experience. A child’s toy becomes innocence preserved. Moss grows in glass beaker like quiet renewal—life continuing where sound once lived. Even the camera feels like an eye of remembrance, watching lovingly from within.

Two elements of clear beaded neon—fueled with Ukrainian krypton gas—bring the sculpture into motion with traveling pearls of white light. One spirals within the cello like a living hymn. The other wraps around the exterior in an abstract corkscrew and returns inside, a luminous thread that binds what was, what is, and what will be. The light does not simply illuminate the piece—it behaves like legacy itself: moving, circulating, passed forward.

The image for Legacy Canticle was given to the artist in the early morning of his 68th birthday as a vision gifted by his muses. In his process, each object exudes its own aura—its own history made radiant. These energies gather inside the instrument and become a collective ancestral field of light, turning the cello into a reliquary of family lineage, love, and the sacred power of music to hold us together across time.