Sculpted in Hell

SCULPTED HELL

Ralphael Plescia spent fifty years filling a two story building at 1324 South State Street with sculptures and paintings based on his own interpretations of the Bible. Self taught. No formal training. Just a man and a building and a half century of work that he called the Christian School.

We visited on October 28th, 2016. He was still alive then. Still working.

We talked for a long time about Mother in Heaven. Heavenly Mother. The Lady of Wisdom. She appears in his work, emerging from the floor alongside lions and dragons and figures from Revelation. Plescia had thoughts about her that went well beyond anything you'd hear in a standard Sunday school lesson. He was not a standard Sunday school teacher. He was a man who had buried his grandmother, his sister, his father, two daughters, and kept sculpting through all of it. The work shows that. You can feel it in the building.

He took us to the basement. He dug it himself by hand and shovel. Deep enough to reach the water table. Down there he built concrete figures of desperate souls trying to climb out of a pit. A lion. A lamb. The whole thing lit and staged like a scene from somewhere that doesn't have a polite name.

The photographs came back with orbs. Multiple. In that basement, in that light, around those figures. Whether you believe in what orbs represent or not, they were there and the camera saw them and we saw them and the air in that room had a quality to it that is difficult to put into language. Almost a sound. Just below hearing. The kind of thing you notice on the way home and then can't stop noticing.

Plescia died in 2020 at 84. The building passed to the Shriners Children's Hospital. Its fate is unclear. The orbs stayed in the basement. We assume.

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