A Gift for our Stone kin
Two boulders live in the back yard. I can speak to them as individual beings. They seem to stand on their own. Like us, they are not separated from the environment, we rest on 300 more feet of crystalized lava.
This gathering of work invites the spirit of Basalt into the room, inviting us to recognize we are made of the same elements. We are related to these layers of rock.
What gifts would you bring them?
These paintings incorporate or are entirely created with handmade paint. I collect minerals, bones, ash, and rust from meaningful locations; my great-grandmother’s former home, the forests our community helped to protect, the river that is our water-source, our city in disrepair. I transform the objects into pigment by grinding, drying, dissolving, or oxidizing, then mix with oil, local beeswax and pine sap.
The central painting:
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.