Offerings to the Wellspring

I’ve been treading a tricky path these past five years, since starting this blog, trying to reconcile my frequent impulse to withdraw, with the need to share my thoughts and creations publicly. 

As someone who lives with chronic illness as a companion, I have to conserve my energy and protect myself from stress as much as possible, and I haven’t been doing that very well for a long time. Being constantly connected to the internet is the main cause of the problem, and I freely admit that though I am critical of technology, and frequently wish it gone, I am just as susceptible to it as most people. It’s addictive and distracting, for all the connection and creativity it also provides. 

So I’m straddling these opposing needs: to be present and to retreat; to be somebody and to be nobody … And retreat and anonymity are much stronger needs right now.

In order to gift you offerings from my creative wellspring, I need to devote offerings back to it, so I have made the long-overdue decision to withdraw from social media and blogging for the remainder of this year, so I can feed the source that feeds me. 

I hope this lengthy pause will grant me the breathing space to, first and foremost, rest deeply and focus on my health. I also expect it will enable me to open up more fully to creative/spiritual practice, and make some much-needed changes in my life.

My art will still be available from Redbubble, and I will also be contactable via email … though I may be a little slower to reply than usual.

Until 2022, farewell!

Wisdom Across the Ages: Honouring Marija Gimbutas

Marija Gimbutas, 1993 (Source: Monica Boirar / Wikimedia Commons)

The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM) is holding a virtual symposium over the weekend of 16–18 July in celebration of the centennial of the birth of the renowned Lithuanian-American archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994).

                                

Along with presentations by many incredible women (such as Carol P. Christ, Max Dashu and Charlene Spretnak), there is also a public online art show, and I am so pleased that two of my paintings—Mothertongue and Rainmaker—were selected to appear in it. 

  

Mothertongue, 2019

Rainmaker, 2019

Marija Gimbutas’groundbreaking archaeomythological work has had a significant influence on me since I participated in Sylvia Linsteadt’s Witchlines Study Guild in 2018. Not only has Gimbutas’ investigation of the neolithic cultures of Old Europe been of importance (the social structures, peaceful life-ways, and religious practices), but the wealth of imagery in her books—pottery, signs and symbols, and the ubiquitous (mostly) female sculptures and figurines—has been an invaluable, abundant and ongoing wellspring of inspiration for my own art. 

Mothertongue was one of the first paintings I created that came directly out of my immersion in ancient imagery, reaching back into the past in search of the voices of the ancestors. 

Rainmaker was primarily inspired by two figurines from the pages of Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess (1989): the first from southern Italy (c. 5300 BC), with a face this is, I think, calmly ecstatic and receptive; the second from north-east Hungary (c. 5000 BC), with streams of water flowing down her body. It also references the often connected bird and snake symbolism that was so prevalent in Old European artefacts.

I am honoured to have my art included in this exhibition commemorating the life and pioneering interdisciplinary work of Marija Gimbutas. Many thanks to the ASWM for making it possible.

You can find the exhibition here. It will run until 9 September before being archived.

Update (5/09/21): The exhibition will now run until the end of the year.

Marija Gimbutas at Newgrange, Ireland, 1989
(Source: Michael Everson / Wikimedia Commons)

Mystery: A Poem

how little I understand 

my own illness 

its blunt fogs 

its sharp disquiets

the sheerness of the fall 

back into myself 

to be nothing more than 

this body, here and now 

elsewhere and -when 

only a dream I visit 

unwelcome, unwanted 

my face is hidden 

even from myself 

my possibilities impossible 

fragments of life unlived 

scattered on bare ground 

there will be no blossom 

except invisibly – 

phantom flowers 

the painful glorious 

ghostly unknowns 

of the life that is mine

*

I hadn’t written anything in a long time, let alone a poem.

This one arrived when I had a bad headache and fatigue, and was lying in bed trying to rest, if not sleep a bit. Yet in the midst of rest the words started to come, and I had to get up to get my notebook, to record the words before I forgot everything.

A reminder that creative work comes when it is ready, and not before; and sometimes out of the most unlikely and uncomfortable experiences.

The Life I Have Not Lived But Can Remember: The Art

Our little exhibition of women’s art in New Zealand is about midway through now. If you are interested in seeing the works included you can find them on Instagram: @womenremember

Art pictured here from top left is by Nina Paley, Rima Staines, me, Renee Gerlich, Rima Staines, Ruby Constance, Jeanie Tomanek, me, Max Dashu, Nina Paley, Rima Staines, and me. (You can find links to all the artists included in the exhibition in my previous post.)

The Life I Have Not Lived But Can Remember: An Exhibition of Women's Art

I’m so excited to reveal that some of my art is being featured in an exhibition at the Otaki Library in New Zealand from 7–28 June. 

The Life I Have Not Lived But Can Remember: An Exhibition of Women’s Art is the creation of feminist writer and illustrator, Renee Gerlich, who wanted ‘to offer women a collection of depth and vision, in an age full of superficiality, argument and compromise’.

Reproductions of my art are being shown alongside work by Bec Wonders, Deidra Sullivan, Janet Fraser, Jeanie Tomanek, Joanna Pinkiewicz, Lizzie Yee, Max Dashu, Nina Paley, Rima Staines, Ruby Constance and Renee.

As you can imagine, I’m incredibly honoured to have my work seen beside that of these eleven talented women.

The title of the exhibition resonated strongly, for so much of the art I have been making over the past few years has been exactly that—an exploration of the knowing that what once was may be once more. Bringing the reality of ancient culture, myth and spirituality—which I have not lived, but can remember in my bones—back into memory, with the intention of bringing it back into life also.

I hope to be able to show you some of the exhibition from the inside over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime please follow the links to explore the work of the women artists/writers/culture-makers above. And of course my own art can be found on Redbubble.

Below are the posters I designed, featuring Rainmaker and Our Lady of the Seeds.

Disentangling

Life doesn’t move in a straight line, and sometimes it gets especially tangly and twisted. It’s easy to feel stuck and stagnant, trapped in a state that seems wrong. But transformation doesn’t happen without discomfort, and discomfort can become a threshold, an opening onto a new state of being. 

So stay with the unease, the tenderness and confusion. Sit within the tangle of yourself and let it be what it is. Sink deeply into the twists and turns, the worries and world weariness.

It may take some time, but eventually you’ll find you can do nothing other than begin to disentangle and unfurl.

Everglades Historic House & Garden, Leura (October 2016)

Words and image from my Instagram project @the_wild_nun

Isness: The Symbol

Three years ago, when I was deep in my Witchlines studies of Old Europe, this symbol came to me, but it is only now that it became ready to come into being as a painting.

Triangles and arcs have made regular appearances in the art I have made over the past few years, and in some ways this symbol is their origin—this manifestation of emergent being, of above and below, sky and earth, of difference within wholeness.

I felt such a sense of enjoyment as I worked on this painting, of things coming together, of creativity flowing. I think it was worth the wait.

*

A symbol was the physical demonstration of a community’s recognition of the unity underlying apparent diversity.

(Michael Dames, The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered, 1976, p. 81)

The image is sacred, for it is this above all that binds that part of the psyche incarnated in time and space to the unseen dimension that enfolds it. 

(Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 1991, p. 484) 

A sacred image was not an illusion but the possessor of reality itself … 

(Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1976, p. 292) 

Symbols are seldom abstract in any genuine sense; their ties with nature persist, to be discovered through the study of context and association. 

(Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, 1991, p. xv)

The theorists of the Symbolist Movement recognized that the symbol could be something that existed in its own right, diffusing a mysterious influence around itself, and affecting the whole context in which it was placed. Its operations were by no means completely predictable. 

(Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 1972, pp. 16–18)

Isness, watercolours, gouache and Japanese ink on gesso prepared paper (2021)

Bearer

This painting was inspired by a Belorussian cross-stitch pattern!

Found at MagPie’s Corner – East Slavic Rituals, Witchcraft and Culture, it depicts the ‘Butter Lady’ of the spring festival of Maslenitsa, holding crepes and flames. However, I saw the figure in a more celestial light, as a goddess bearing the sun and the moon in her hands. 

From MagPie's Corner

Her horned headdress was inspired by images of Russian horned kichka hats, referring to the female elk, worn by mothers for fertility and protection. Though of course horns are also an ancient moon symbol. 

She is available on Redbubble.

Bearer, watercolours, gouache and acrylics on gesso prepared paper (2021)

When Earth and Sky Were One

For more than a month I’ve been working sporadically on this painting, wondering if I would ever complete it, grappling with problems (despite doing more preparatory planning than usual), and in particular feeling confronted by the many colours.

As I’m not much of a colourist I tend to use just a few related tones, but this painting demanded much more, and who was I to deny the muse? 

I’m still unsure how successful an image this is—it’s so bright!—but it has been growing on me.

I realised only recently that the light sides of the moons face away from the suns in each corner. An oversight, perhaps, but this is because the suns were a late addition to the design, and the moons were always intended to receive their light from the centre, from source. Ultimately, the suns do too.

Here, I repeat the symbols that keep returning: bird, snake, moon, spirals and hands. 

The title refers not to earth and sky being one and the same, but to their being connected, and thus part of the whole. (For more on this idea please see my previous post Resacralising the Sky.) 

As with all my art, this image is available from my Redbubble shop.

When Earth and Sky Were One, watercolours, gouache, and gold and copper acrylic
on gesso prepared paper (2021)

Resacralising the Sky

The unity and coherence of the metaphysical ideas of … ancient peoples become more accessible if we are aware of the limitations of our own minds in approaching them. If earth and sky were resacralized, it might be easier for us to rediscover the ‘language’ of the goddess.

(1, my emphasis)

*

When I read it in The Myth of the Goddess the above idea about the resacralisation of earth and sky stayed with me. That, and the lunar focus of ancient cultures, is what has led me to create a number of ‘sky images’ in my art over the past two years (see Messenger of the Invisible, Rainmaker, or Our Lady of the Stars). However this has made me feel uneasy, seeing as the sky/air is so often related to mind, spirit and transcendence—and the concept of transcendence, in particular, does not sit well with me. I would much rather be making earthy, grounded images instead, but with the exception of The Broad One or Beneath the Mountain, which do peer downwards, I seem to have my head in the clouds.

As I said last year in my post about Matrix, the aim of my art is to synthesise numerous influences into symbols that have meaning for me (and hopefully others too). This synthesis is how my writing came about also—though perhaps that is how all art works and I am merely stating the obvious. Yet it seems very important, the sifting I do through what I read, the images I seek and return to, and how I then put things together to try to come to some understanding of what is, from my own perspective at the margins of things. 

I am all too aware of the limitations of my own mind due to illness, and how difficult it is for me to understand these speculative concepts, let alone write about them (parts of this were written a year ago, then abandoned), but perhaps making art is how I am attempting to figure things out.

I’ve known for some time that the way I think, and even feel, about some things takes on a kind of spatial quality—illness, for instance, has a circumference—and so it makes sense that I would also explore this visually. So far this has manifested as an exploration of verticality, and the interpenetration of different worlds and substances: sky and earth / water and earth / spirit and matter / above and below. 

But this constant looking skyward bothered me, until I realised that all of my sky images emphasise a distinct downward trajectory—the movement of water / rain / energy / spirit / lunar light down and into the earth.

This is, in a sense, how I am attempting to resacralise what has been disconnected and desacralised, to reconnect the sky with earth once more.

I am reminded of David Abram’s words about the atmosphere being an integral part of earth:

The air is not a random bunch of gases simply drawn to earth by the earth’s gravity, but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world, each creature exchanging certain ingredients for others as it inhales and exhales … Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet’s name, and call it “Eairth,” in order to remind ourselves that the “air” is entirely a part of the eairth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element. (2)

In reading Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018) I have also learnt that geological processes have an effect on the atmosphere too. That the seemingly solid stony structures of the earth move and breathe in a long, slow dance with the shorter, faster dances of living beings.

The truth is that everything is connected, and everything is here. 

I’m not entirely sure what this means, or how to understand it in my bones, my flesh and blood, but it’s what I wish to represent in my work.

It’s all about connection—nothing exists alone or isolated. Everything is in relationship to something else, everything else, consciously or otherwise. Matter cannot live, cannot be, without the existence and commingling of spirit, nor spirit without the embodiment of matter. A constant exchange is taking place, and spirals—a symbol found in the art of cultures all around the world—evoke that: the constant energy, movement, and process of life–death–rebirth. 

To pay attention and make offerings to that process, I think that’s one of the reasons why I am making art. To be part of it, when consciously, and physically, I do not always feel part of it.

I’m on the edge of life. 

Though the edge is also the frontier, where creativity and innovation takes place. The edge is where dualities interweave. 

And it’s all sacred.

As Wendell Berry has written:

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places. (3)

References

1. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, Arkana: London, 1991, p. 104

2. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage: New York, 2010, p. 101

3. From Wendell Berry’s poem ‘How to Be a Poet’

Wise Words: A Heroine’s Resurrection

I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, but actually found I couldn’t put it down. While it is, at times, utterly harrowing, it is also full of hope and possibility. Despite severe illness, Sarah Ramey just does not give up, and she arrives at insights and conclusions, about the medical system, and society and culture, that make a lot of sense to me. She becomes ‘quietly expert at the art of fruitful despair’ (Sarah Ramey, The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir, Fleet: London, 2020, p. 237).

I noticed that there are some one-star reviews on Goodreads, people saying it is truly terrible. It’s not a perfect book—no book is!—but I don’t think the reviews are entirely justified. It will not appeal to everyone, but for me it was though-provoking and endarkening. I am sharing the quote below in the hope that it inspires (or reinforces the knowings of) others.

*

… A heroine’s resurrection is not a release from the wheel—not an ascension, an end of samsara, a rising out of the body, a final deliverance. It’s not a slaying of anything, of bad guys, of dragons, or Orcs, or ogres—not even a slaying of inner demons. A heroine’s resurrection is down, into the wheel of life—a rooting into the dark, turning earth. A claiming of the body, a realignment with the psyche, and a partnership with the dark, wormy dirt itself. She becomes literally grounded. Her whole job is to learn how to work with life—including the demons and the darkness—not against it, not transcending it, not denying it, not dominating it, not submerging the ugly parts, not striving forever to be better, lighter, brighter, perfect, perfect, best, champion.

Her job is to understand the shadow.

And when this initiate comes back to the upper world, instead of that being the end of the adventure, it’s actually the beginning.

That person now has the job of accompanying others, guiding others, strengthening others as they go through their own difficult, painful descents, disintegrations, and reconfigurations.

Like Persephone.

Goddess of the seasons.

Put another way:

It’s an ecological initiation.

It’s not about learning how to win or dominate something or someone else. It’s about learning how to grow strong roots, and to thrive in connection, cyclically, with everything else.

And this requires not being afraid of the dark.

It requires working with life as it is—worms and all.

(pp. 229–230) 

The Not-Quite-Summer

La Niña, with her cool temperatures and regular rainfall, has made this season a not-quite-summer. It has been lush and green, in contrast to the hot, dry, bushfire season of last year, and for that I am grateful. Yet it has passed by so quickly, it all seems a bit of a blur, and an age since I have posted here. 

Over the past few months I remember immersing myself in the art, spirituality and heartfelt politics of Monica Sjöö. Such an extraordinary woman!

And a close encounter with two bold butcherbirds.

It has, overall, been a summer of spiders, with webs appearing everywhere—perhaps they are holding the edges of the world together. (These photos were taken on the misty summer solstice). 

I’ve also read this influential and fascinating book by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, which has given me food for thought.

As usual, summer has played havoc with my health, so I’ve needed to slow down—a practice I am still working on—and I’m going to be stepping back from online engagements for a while. I hope I’ll have some new art to show you soon, but to make that possible requires a bit of quiet cocooning so I can come back to centre once more, renewed and reenergised. 

I’m expecting autumn to arrive early, though perhaps I will be wrong and some warm sunny weather will arrive before the cold does. Either way, I’m going to try to enjoy it. Even with all the uncertainty of these strange times, and my own illness to contend with, life is good.

Wise Words: The Presence of the Past

An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naïve than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt from the laws of nature. The “modern” kind of magical thinking is characterized by the belief that repeating falsehoods like incantations can transform them into scientific truth. It is also yoked to a quasi-mystical faith in the free market, which, according to the prophets, will somehow allow us to live beyond our means indefinitely.

The problem, in essence, is that rates of technological progress far outstrip the rate at which human wisdom matures (in the same way that environmental changes outpace evolutionary adaptation in mass extinction events). Critic and author Leon Wieseltier contends that “every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences.” The rapid obsolescence of digital technologies and the cultural flotsam they deliver corrodes our respect for what lasts (“That was so five minutes ago”). And just as reliance on GPS navigation systems causes our capacity for spatial visualization to atrophy, the frictionless, atemporal instantaneity of digital communications weakens our grasp on the structure of time. Our “modern” idea that only Now is real is arguably delusional, while the medieval concept of “wyrd” [the power of the past upon the present] seems positively enlightened. And our blindness to the presence of the past in fact imperils our future.

(Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 2018, p. 164)

Connecting with Cycles

This is a study made in preparation for a larger work, complete with wonky moons and spirals. But then, I am a bit wonky myself. 

Summer is not an easy season to move through, and my energy levels have been low, so it feels good just to complete something, however wobbly it is.

Progress in my studio is slow and sporadic at present, but there are ideas a-brewing. I have also set up an artist page on Facebook, to keep things a little more seperate from my personal profile. You can follow me there if you feel so inclined.

I don’t know precisely what I want to do with my art, seeing as illness keeps me regularly fluctuating between enthusiasm and apathy, but I think it is good to be taking tiny steps towards whatever growth and change may occur.

Connecting with Cycles, felt tip pen, ink and gold paint on paper (2021)