Art Residency, Tla'amin land by the Salish Sea. WIP
Artist Statement: I am curious about exploring allurement, as a principle that attracts and pulls us into our evolutionary flow of existence, as opposed to addiction, which evokes feelings of emptiness and pushes us forward by means of pain. I want to feel more into the kind of aliveness that is not matched by anything else, which comes from the experience of creating beauty that didn’t exist before in the universe, that adds to the universe, that is uniquely mine to create. During this residency I will be attuning to allurement and documenting my emergent process, which involves, but is not limited to, working with wild clay.
Click on audio file if you prefer to listen to how this project evolved.
When I began my residency at Tidal Arts Centre I made a list of my ancestors, dating back to their homelands in Scotland and Ireland, and invited them on this journey with me. I feel their presence with me as well as a pull to go to visit the land where they come from. Through my time here I learned the Scottish Gaelic name for the area of Applecross, a small town near the Hebrides where my maternal great grandparents are from, is A’ Chomraich, which means The Sanctuary. I have a yearning to learn more about this area, which is not easy to get to and feels very much at the edge of the world.
Tidal Arts Centre feels like a Sanctuary (Comraiche) at the edge of the world ~ not in connection with the church or other sacred place where a refuge was immune from arrest (as it often was in Scotland), but from the Latin sanctuarium, a container for keeping something in.
The journey begins with…
making closed, hollow, spheres from local clay. I follow my instinct to repeatedly make spheres with clay and paint abstract circular shapes in my handmade book.
The form is an open metaphor ~ it is a
womb, husk, moon, meteor, portal into the unknown…
sanctuarium
a container that holds the sacredness of life, reverence for life, is generative in nature and has a quality of relations and a principle of cooperation and responsibility to each other and the earth, forests, waters, rocks, plants and animals.
Hollow forms begin to open, revealing a pulse/thrum/quaking (awake/q’wake’ing)/trembling ~ an opening into the generative pulse of their nature in the belly of my being….
if I am still enough, resourced and in my body - life feels life - life that lies below culture, life as deep, vast, dark ocean.
I am allured by cracks/fissures in rocks where the water pools and flows. I am finding them everywhere - on the land and in my handmade journal. In my dream group we work Elsa’s dream…
sensing the wasp boring deep into a dark, moist fig with focus and a lot of energy…to leave it’s eggs/reproduce…bring life….and, at the same time feeling moisture in my mouth, wondering what feeds me, what am I hungry for? and I know what I am most hungry for is connected to the womb, source, creativity, and I long to drop down through the tear/crack to the source of creative imagination.
In the dropping down I ask, What can I let go of that isn’t nourishing? What do I hold onto that I can let go of through this opening?
“We might find that the void consists of both nothingness and everything-ness and that it can be an unlimited source of serenity, sanity, energy and inspiration.” Vanessa Machada de Oliveira
Perhaps it is in the sacred act of letting go that creates an opening to the process of life as a giving…
it’s not the act of giving or what we give that makes the difference, its that we open ourselves up to giving as a way of being.
How do I make every act, every breath, into the process of giving?
From I Ching hexagram 8 (Pi), let the heart be full of sincerity as an earthenware vessel is of its contents, and it will in the end bring other advantages.
I begin each day with making a tiny earthenware offering vessel from materials of this place, fill it’s belly with nourishing food and give the food as a daily offering to the ocean. Just begin with the intention, and act, of giving daily to the ocean waters and see what happens.
The daily ritual became an invocation of sorts that opens a way of engaging more deeply with my inner world and the spirit of this place.
The journey continues…
and becomes an intuitive and cyclical movement between making spheres, opening & offering vessels... .weaving my way through these images, as they are called forth through dreams and impulses, creating a precious container to hold the emergent and nourishing vision.
In my dream I return to the question ~ what am I holding onto that needs to be let go of?
defences & preconceptions, old ways of thinking, worries, fears
and a precious vessel I have made.
I prepare a ceremony where I place all that weighs me down into one of my opening spheres and place it in the ocean around the time of the full moon to watch it dissolve...removing the separation between in here (inner) and out there (outer)…
and I follow the impulse to create larger offering bowls with greater capacity for sincerity, authenticity and expressing what rings true.
Accordian book (sampling of pages) tracking new moon to new moon for two cycles
** locally made inks, clay, liquid graphite, & ochre
It is particularly relevant in the spirit of our times to be conscious of our carbon footprint and how we transform the matter of our planet - taking agency in the transformation process is critical - to examine larger cycles and how things feed each other - synergy. What kind of transformation process is being asked of us? Of the clay? What is being asked of me to change my way of thinking, my ‘business as usual’, in service to living in respectful relationship to all life.