Our GodsMust Be Crazy
We have built temples to the wrong things.
Our Gods Must Be Crazy is a collection of six sculptural works by Greenthing Kenya’s Hotshop. Each one is an act of witness. Together, they name the systems we participate in daily without question: the gods we serve through habit, convenience, and normalised excess.
Each sculpture is constructed from two materials in conversation. The glass is 100% reclaimed window glass, collected from Dandora, East Africa’s largest dumpsite, by the women we work with in Nairobi. The wood is reclaimed from tree stumps and exposed roots cleared across Kenya to make way for construction on land that did not need to lose its trees.
The glass is mouth-blown by hand directly into the cavities, joints, and exposed grain of the wood in our Hotshop in Nairobi. The two materials do not merely coexist. They are fused. Neither is what it was before.
This is not a collection about guilt. It is a collection about visibility. The invitation is simple: to see clearly what we have long chosen not to look at.
“And when they ask for more, we call it development.”
The Six Gods
Three available now · Three already in private hands · Each a limited edition of one
The God of Overconsumption
Full. Deliberately, almost uncomfortably so. Gorged. Swollen. Beautiful. What we overconsume rarely looks like waste in the moment. It looks like abundance. The wood beneath it once held the earth. Now it holds this.
The God of Disposability
An entire civilisation engineered around things meant to be thrown away. The glass here was itself discarded before it became this. There is a deep irony in giving permanence to the god of the temporary. This god will outlast everything that created it.
The God of Overproduction
We do not produce to meet need. We produce to generate demand. In Kenya we see it in the mountains of secondhand clothing arriving from the global north. Africa as the world’s discard drawer. The wood was load-bearing. Now it bears this god instead.
The God of Convenience
The most seductive god of all. It simply asks us to choose the easier option. And then again. Until it is the only one we can see. The roots are gnarled and difficult. The glass is smooth and immediate. The tension between them is the work.
The God of Extraction
The founding logic: that the earth, and the people on it, exist to be taken from. These trees were cleared not for art but for construction. Kenya is losing its tree cover. These stumps remember what was lost.
The God of Speed
Speed makes all the others possible. When everything moves fast enough, there is no time to ask questions. Slowness is resistance. Heating glass to 1100℃ and blowing it by mouth into reclaimed wood is deliberate slowness in a world that rewards the opposite.
Each god in this collection is singular. The wood determines the form and the glass responds to the wood. No two pieces share the same cavity, the same grain, the same history of growth and interruption. What you acquire is not reproducible.
Upon acquisition, each collector receives an individual material passport documenting the specific glass weight, glass source, wood provenance, and full production record for their piece.
First Offerings is the opening chapter. Future collections in the Our Gods Must Be Crazy series will introduce new gods and new material conversations.