"Weavers" at Wesley Theological, 2009

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on."

Catherine Keller, "From a Broken Web"

"What is the new mythology to be, the mythology
of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?"

Joseph Campbell

"Weaver's" will be installed in the staircase entryway at Wesley, formed from casts of Wesley staff and students. All arts, like dreams, have different layers of meaning. As I worked, the "story" of this progression of hands became clearer to me. It is dedicated to the ongoing collaboration of the community of the Luce Center - for me, it is also a new “telling” of the Spider Woman, the weaver deity found throughout Native American mythology.

It’s said that all stories
originate in the mind
of Spider Woman.

The "Hand and Eye" is the hand of the Divine, from which all inspirations come. Because it's also about the evolution of an idea, which became the arts center at Wesley, the first pair of hands belong to Cathy Kapikian, who retired this year after founding the program more than 25 years ago.


"The Seed Planter" seemed a fitting progression because all inceptions need visionary collaborators, people who find the means to "ground it into the soil."

Tiles are based on stories told me by those who volunteered their hands. Mr.Tortorici told me that his family came from a village famous for growing olives, and so I made an olive branch. Ms. Oden, who is the Dean, told me she missed the wild storms of her Great Plains homeland, and so I inscribed a storm on her panel.

Dr. Hopkins is an archaeologist who has spent years in the holy lands, so his panel has pottery shards.


Mr. Soulen is a banjo player and a bee keeper, which is why I put a flower on the neck of his instrument. The harmonies of music, and honey, sweeten the mix.

Doug Purnell is a painter, providing the hands of the artist. Olaf, who is from Iceland (thus, the "Cod Shield") makes her art from fabric. And Amy Gray brought the Gardener's graceful hands, offering the "flowering" of an idea.

Finally, I included the hands of Colleen Nelson, who has been a community activist all of her life.

Next to last, those of Deborah Sokolove, the new Director of the Luce Center. Deborah says of her Iconic artwork that they are "prayers made visible", and so I titled her panel (she made her own tiles) the "Iconographer".




Here is the structure:

“The Divine Hand”

“The Weaver” - “The Seed Planter”
(because inceptions need visionary collaborators, people who can "ground it into the soil.")

“The Orcharder” “The Archaeologist”
One to tend growing trees, to insure they will be fruitful. And nothing can be planted without understanding the past.

“The Artist” - “The Administrator”
(Art brings aesthetics. And administrators weather storms.)

“The Musician” - “The Gardener”
Music brings harmony , bees and gardens collaborate to flower.

“The Advocate” - “The Seamstress”
A seamstress is one who fine tunes the fabric, mending tears, while activists bring justice, attending to threads that are broken.

“The Iconographer” - “Hands of the Future”

I grew up with a Native American painting, that belonged to my father, of horses running across a desert. One of the horses was turquoise blue. When I assembled my panels, I found I had an "extra hand" from the cast of a child. I remembered that painting, and how the artist used the blue horse to show the presence of Spirit. So the last panel is for those who will weave anew the thread. And for those who are not yet born.

The thread has no beginning, and no end.

"It seems as if we have been placed in an alchemical retort, forced to live through the fire of transformation, for the most part, unconsciously.........The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field. It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring

New Work 2009

PRAYERS FOR THE DYING
These works are dedicated to my brother, Glenn.

I needed to do these pieces as "prayers". They speak better to me than words. I had these wonderful casts of hands, and also tiles imprinted with words and letters..........words, syllables, sentences are what we create the stories of our lives with. Before the words, the feelings, the belonging, the response, the one who experiences. Perhaps dying is shattering those "vessels" of words and ideas and constructs that have created the personae we have come to inhabit. Terra cotta pottery shards imprinted with words seemed like a perfect medium. Perhaps, leaving the words and vessels behind, at last, we fly.

Returning 2009

"Form is empty, emptiness is form.
Likewise, sensation, discrimination,
conditioning, and awareness are empty.
In this way, Shariputra, all things are emptiness;
they are without defining characteristics;
they are not born, they do not cease"

THE HEART SUTRA

The Heart Sutra

Somewhere within the "hoop" of who we are, within the space between the child and the old man the beginning place and the ending place.........in the center is the heart. I think above all that is where our "soul making" has gone on.

Holy Mother Take My Hand (2009)

Reliquary

This Reliquary has two potent symbols of transformation - a feather left behind from the flight of a Phoenix, and the skin of a snake.

Dream Weaver 2009

Somehow this image is very important to me. We ourselves are the great work of art in progress, and we are all connected to the Web of being. These are Spider Woman's hands, the Dream Weaver, weaving a new dream in the silence, the dark, the depths of innermost being.

.Of life's Spring
may we drink deep
and awake to dream
and die to sleep

and dreaming
weave another form
a shining thread
of life reborn

~~Starhawk
"The Weaver Song" from the Spiral Dance

The
Midwife's
Hands

are our hands.

Spider Woman's Hands 2007 - 2009

"How might we live, how might we act,
if we saw the world with a Webbed Vision?"

Catherine Keller, "From a Broken Web"

"Thought Woman Weaving the World" (2007)

In 2007 it was my privilege to have a fellowship at the Alden Dow Creativity Center at Northwood University in Michigan, to develop "Hands of the Spider Woman" - a community arts project exploring the Native American creation story of the Spider Woman. I offer my gratitude as well to my collaborator Kathy Space, and the many people in the community of Midland who participated. I also want to thank the Puffin Foundation for further support and the Midland Center for the Arts for our exhibit. In 2008 the project continued at the Creative Spirit Center, also in Michigan. In 2009, I will continue exploring the theme as a resident artist at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.

Icons and Thread, Midland Arts Center, 2009

"Weaving a Web" in performance, 2004 (Muse Community Arts Center)

From Photographic Catalog, Exhibit at Midland Arts Center, 2007

Spider Woman's Hands is also a book, and can be viewed at YELLOW LEAF PRESS.

The Masks of the Goddess 1999-2008

I've always been fascinated with masks as sacred tools - as “vessels for the archetypal powers”. In 1999, after studying mask arts in Bali, I created 30 masks of Goddesses from spiritual traditions around the world for the 20th Annual SPIRAL DANCE in San Francisco. Inspired by the Balinese, I wanted to offer my collection as contemporary "Temple Masks". As colleagues used the masks, they filled with energy and collective story. No artist could ask for more.

Here are some of the people who have used the collection. Thank you, truly, for dancing the Goddess into the hearts of so many.

Macha Nightmare, Mana Youngbear, Serene Zloof, Ann Bridgit Weller, Diane Darling, Barbara Jaspersen, Shelly McHugh "Valley High", David Jeffers & Benad Hasche, Monika Mann, Kelly Nelson, Flynt Garner, Silk, Duncan Cook, Evelie Posche, Lilla Luoma, Will Clipman, Jeff Grienke, Isobel Amourous, Kathy Huataluhta, Ileya Stewart, Morgana Canady, Valerie James, Quynn Elizabeth, Katherine Josten, Erica Swadley, Grey Eagle, Ann Huggins, Celestine Star, Kala, Eleni, Abby Willowroot and the Goddess 2000 Project, Alan Moore, Drissana Devananda, Elizabeth Fuller, Conrad Bishop, Ann Beam, Paloma Hill, Jim Hewes, Arjuna & Tuva Space, Jo Odessa & Buka Creati, Deborah Scott Gren, Mary Kay Landon, Tami, Amadae,

Jim Lovette-Black, Sabina Magliocco, July Lewis, Juan Pablo, Farida Fox, Tara Webster, Stacy kalkowski, Lee Hendrickson, Adrienne Hirt, Barbara BBC (“White Buffalo Woman”), Amie Miller, Freya Anderson, Morgaine Harris, Laura Janesdaughter, Tansy Brooks, Willow Kelly, Dawn Marlowe, Damira Norris, Maria Wahlstrom, Fontain and Fontain's Muse, Kendra, Copper Persephone, Eleni Livitsanos, Jamra, Cypress, Cris Ferreira, Starhawk and RECLAIMING, Christy Salo, Melusina Gomez, Maritza Schaefer, Journey, Nada Khodlova, Stessa, Angela Blessing, Rachel Morgain, Catlin & Reggie Williams, Ingrid Aspomatis, Annie and Phil, Carlin Diamond, Alan & Audrey Smith, Lea Bender, The Veil and "Sophia Speaks", Sammi Alijagic, Paul Fisher, Toker Johnston, Linda Johnston, Motherbear Scott, The Muse Community Arts Center, Ashley Wallace, Melissa Penn, Laura Dubois, Dorit Bat Shalom, Jeanne Koelle, Karina McAbee, Navaab Munirith, Charlie Adams, Sharon Kihara, Nettie, Corinne Levy, Judy Foster, Dina, Amanda Allison, Wendy Cornelius, Copper, Kendra Stone, Jamra , Bombshell Betty, Heaven, Ariel, Shanel, Carrie Adams, Kim Arnold, Nadirah Adeye, Thallia Bird, April Taylor, Donna Peck, Dailey Little, Rhonda, Marisa Scirocco, Jonette Ford, Lyndzee Dava, Ayelen Liberona, Carolyn Lucento, Pythia and the Temple of the Goddess…………and many more.

And thanks to Thomas Lux, Peter Hughes, Ann Beam, and Ileya Stewart for the generous use of their photographs.

"The masks of the goddess workshop was a pivotal event in my life. I have been feeling the Goddesses waking up ever since.....although none of us chose to focus on a specific goddess,they were there, definitely there."

L. Hogan, Kripalu Participant, 2007
To learn more about the book, www.yellowleafpress.blogspot.com,

or visit the publisher.

SARASWATI - Goddess of Truth, and the Arts

Love is Saraswati's river flowing through our lands.
She will feed the rice fields, She will accept our woven offerings.
She will bear our ashes
and the fires of Kintamani to the sea.
Formless, she neither takes nor gives:
we impose these significances
upon the flowers we cast in her.
From birth to death, Saraswati's river
sustains us to the sea.

I Made Sura Warini, 2000

Earth Shrines 2005

"She will rust us with blossom,

She will forgive us, She will seal us with Her seed."

Robin Williamson

"Earth Shrines" were a series of mixed media sculptures I did in 2005 as a resident at both I Park Artist's Enclave in Connecticut, and at the Brushwood Folklore Center in New York. I feel my rambles in those green, vibrant places, and the "numina" or spirits of place - graced me with a daily conversation.Mother/Tree Shrine

Gaia Shrine


This is an image I do over and over..........it re-occurs in pieces I did for "Spider Woman's Hands" often. We are a part of the creativity and life of Gaia, the Earth - perhaps we can remember to consciously live, and create, within that paradigm.

The Black Madonna of medieval Europe, many scholars suggest, was the ancient Earth Mother, revered beneath the iconography of the Church. To me, the Black Madonna is about the numinous "spirit of place" associated with sacred places. Before there were churches, there were special caves and trees and wells, places where people went to "speak with the Earth" - to be healed, reborn, and symbolically participate in the cycles of nature. Almost certainly this is what many of the pre-Christian "Mysteries" were about, including the Elusinian Mysteries associated with Demeter and Persephone. I took the image a step further, and installed Her in a tree.

"There was once a vast pilgrimage that took place in Europe. Pilgrims made their way towards the town of Compostella in Spain, where an ancient effigy of the BLACK MADONNA is housed. The word Compostella comes from the same root word as compost. COMPOST is the living, black material that is made from rotting fruits, grains and other organic matter. From this compost -- life and light will emerge. When the pilgrims came to the Cathedral at Compostella they were being 'composted' in a sense. After emergence from the dark confines of the cathedral and the spirit -- they were ready to flower, they were ready to return home with their spirits lightened." ~~ Jay Weidner

Persephone Reliquary (2005)

The world does not need God for us to praise it—

Its beauty aches
inside our jagged loins.
Lightning
that tears the sky
to show the hot
white light behind;
The crannied, riddled earth; the colors that emblaze it;

A jumble of two pulses unthinking passion joins;
Healing from the taproot, redemption of the blind.

Blood like holy water shrouds each birth;
Fish amid the coral like random, sparkling coins;
Waves that curl and sputter; the forest veined and lined;
The earth is all the grace we need on earth:
Embrace what’s kind.

Arthur Naiman (2003)

"Anima/Animus Shrine"

The Artist's Oracular Cook Book

~ Recipes for the Muse ~

"Art is food for the Soul. Bon Appetit."

In the summer of 2005 I was blessed with a residency at the Artist's Enclave at IPark. At the time, I was playing with the idea of Divination cards. It's an IPark tradition for each resident to contribute a special "cocktail recipe" when they leave. And so, in the course of that magical summer, The Artist's Oracular Cook Book became my contribution.

"Begin with a Leap of Faith"

To learn more about the book,
visit yellow leaf press

Oracles

The Rainbow Bridge Oracle (1993 to 2003) was inspired by a long fascination with the Tarot and the use of images for Divination. It gradually evolved into a very personal "Oracle" that reflects my own internal iconography. The Rainbow Bridge is being created as we become a global society, forging a multi-cultural vocabulary for the sacred.

There are 37 images in the collection, but I still haven't gotten around to publishing it. One of these days..............Some images are Giclee prints. For information, please Contact me

BALANCE

TRANSFORMATION

THE STAR - GRACE

THE LOVERS