The Temporary Jesus Head Was Never Meant to Be the Final Fix
A decade ago, artist Heather Wise made a clay head to fix a vandalized statue at a local church. It was never meant to be the final fix, but it attracted attention right away, and it has come to be known ever since as the Temporary Jesus Head incident — a name that outlasted the object. The furor put Sudbury, Ont., on the international map for a time. The head itself had a short run: when the clay started to dissolve in the rain, staining the marble, it was returned to Wise, who still has it. The statue's original marble head was eventually returned to the church and re-attached, and the furor died down.
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The comedy here is material science. A stopgap sculpted in clay and left outdoors was always likely to lose to rain, and it lost in the most humiliating way available: it dissolved and stained the marble it had been installed to dignify. A repair that damages the thing it repairs is a special kind of failure.
The ending is stranger than the joke, though. The marble head came back and slid straight into anonymity — nobody names a statue for its original nose. The failed substitute is the one still in the artist's possession, still carrying a name. The stopgap outlived its replacement in memory, which is not how restoration is supposed to work.