Paintings
Grounded - a community in space
How do we perceive the environment?
How is it integrated into our psyche?
Do we share in these perceptions?
I gathered twelve plants from our neighborhood forest and nine local pigments from the city, river, and roadside.
I invited several participants to individually sit at my table.
I asked them to inhale each scent one at a time and look at each color one at a time.
I asked them to feel in their body where the sensation resided,
if at all.
Then to color in the print of the human body where they percieved the sensation.
Almost everyone felt sage in their feet and lower legs, wild currant in the palm of their hands, granite outside their head.
Some sensations were specific to the individual, but as a group filled in the whole body.
This is a portrait of a community. Their shared body is represented as a starburst of thirteen points.
The shape of the starburst is based on a dream.
*The dream*
Twelve lightning bolts visited Earth. They invited me to transform into one of them. I would be the Thirteenth.
With violent speed we would travel infinite space for infinite time.
They took me on a trip to three corners of existence. Planets, galaxies, life.
I could see the beauty of everything but could not feel or know it.
If I moved with them I would have no emotion.
I wouldn’t care about what I saw, just that I had seen it. A tourist.
I chose to stay on earth where I could feel the ground
to experience love and anguish.