Soul Work
Sometimes my art delves deeply into inner experiences. I find echoes and intersections of these encounters in the physical world of landscapes and objects in daily life. The animate, the luminous, the numinous. These pieces came from the experiences of connections with something greater than myself.
Emergence
A few years of having an “empty nest” left me feeling useless and dried up. The feeling didn’t go away for a long time, and on my hikes I found myself relating with empty dried up husks and spent seed pods. At last there came a quickening, and my spirit began to come back to life.
Mixed media on a large back panel from an old refrigerator found in our scrap yard on the farm.
Where Shadow Finds Light
Shadows. bones. moths to a flame. light.
Encaustic wax, photography, and found materials.
The Bardo
As a result of contracting COVID, my daughter went through a mental health crisis that almost ended in losing her. Like may near tragedies, it became transformational. That summer the violent storms reflected my inner state, terrible and cataclysmic and beautiful.
12”x9” gouache
Disconnected
I made this sculpture during COVID, when I felt so very disconnected from the rest of the world. I found the telephone wire insulator on our homestead farm in an old outbuilding, with the wire still wrapped around it.
Ceramic and found materials
As Above so Below
A particular tree on our farm stops me in my tracks every time I hike by it in the pasture. It has a presence, and the curve of its double trunk and its late afternoon shadows always say to me, "X marks the spot. Stop. Listen.” It makes me contemplate that as above, so below. Life-nurturing nests blown down by the wind, egg shells of long-gone hatchlings, bones. All of these things belong to the tree. It knows that the leaves will always fall and the buds will always grow.
Encaustic wax, photography and found materials.
Shadow Owes its Birth to Light
For a few weeks that felt like an eternity, this tree was my only friend. I lived alone in an old cabin in the desert far from humans. It was a difficult time, a ‘dark night of the soul’ if you will. There were days that I avoided stepping on shadows, in fear that they would open and swallow me up and I’d never find light again.
This mesquite tree was ancient, she had lived and thrived before cattlemen and settlers came and cut and used her. She must have been magnificent before that, this Grandmother who is now gnarled and broken and dead. She is magnificent still. She drew me to her every day, and I spent a great deal of time in her presence. I could see her from the bedroom window of the cabin, she kept watch over me when dark spirits spiraled in the night winter winds. Ultimately, she gave me the seeds that led back to light.
Encaustic wax, photography and found materials.