Caroline Covington emphasizes peace through superior firepower, if you discarded the bullets.

The exiting sculpture student loads concepts of Eastern spirituality and Western weaponry into well-honed pieces that she said she hopes inoculate dangerous images through symmetry and meditative form.

“The running theme of the show is modern mediation, using imagery that we normally view as violent or evil and how we water it down,” said Covington, a senior from Ft. Stewart.

In one particular piece, solid white rifles and grenades are arranged into a mandala – a geometric design that emphasizes spiritual symbolism.

Similar pieces hang off of walls or lay on the floor in sizes ranging from four to nine feet in diameter, color-tipped at the ends.

The latter piece “will allow you to step into it, with all of the guns pointing to the center,” she said.

“I have three main pieces with images of mandalas, which promote ‘center’ or ‘compression,’” she said. “They’ll be rearranged daily.”

Tonight’s opening reception will be accompanied by a performance piece that Covington said is “not tremendously political, but I’m definitely questioning our culture.”

“It’s important to question what you do and why you do certain things and to explore other ways people do things,” she said. “I’ll always be attracted to it because it’ll always be around.”

Early responses were both positive and negative, as the material details combat in her own particular nuance.

“To question (the exhibit) is to draw a kind of political line around it,” she said. “This isn’t about any specific war – I grew up in a military family in an environment where we had a firing range. It’s not dangerous to me.”

The exhibit’s title was chosen by Covington from a hymn she found inspirational.

“I think that the idea of a ‘slender rest’ is that we only get a portion of what we think, and perhaps we need to focus on something more or higher than ourselves for a couple minutes or more a day – to take a breather.”

“We should all look for a ‘slender rest,’” she said.