"Our Lady of the Shards" - Mosaic Shrines (2018 - 2019)

                 

  The Series is  collectively called "Our Lady of the Shards" as they are meant to honor that which has been buried, lost or broken, and is now re-surfacing to the contemporary world to tell us the ancient stories that we need now.   Working in a pottery studio, I saw many beautiful broken pottery shards lying about, and I began to think of artists sometimes being "mythic archeologists", uncovering and resurrecting the lost and forgotten lives and wisdom of the past, piecing it together to find the shapes and reveal the mysteries.  Or it could be said that the Spirits of the past are rising from the broken shards, insistant on being heard and honored, because they are once again truly needed.

Shrine to the Ancient Midwives

"Our Lady of the Forgotten Midwives"  remembers the enduring love of Millenia of Ancestral Midwives, the women whose hands brought each generation into the world.   

The Memory Keeper II

"The Memory Keeper" was inspired by a song called "Water from Another Time", which speaks eloquently of the wisdom and gifts of the elderly, and of previous times, needed to nourish each new generation.    

Our Lady of the Desert Spring

Our Lady of the Desert Spring is a bas relief ceramic mosaic that is  a  personal Icon loosely inspired by traditional  Catholic Iconic imagery.  It is meant to be accompanied by a prayer or poem, in both English and Spanish, and is also designed to include a  mosaic "frame" or border as part of the presentation.  "Our Lady of the Desert Spring" also represents an invocation to the "Numina" or "spirit of place" of the desert. Water is the true life blood of the desert,  its most precious resource.  

Hecate

The Black Madonna

The Black Madonna reflects my personal sense that this widely archetypal image, a source of many pilgrimages to sacred places throughout Europe for thousands of years,  represents the Earth Mother, the dark rich soil that sustains us

The Bone Goddess

Old Masks

The Memory Keeper I

The Weaver

Shrine for the Forgotten Midwives

Our Lady of the Waters

New Mosaic - "Our Lady of the Waters"

"Our Lady of the Waters" (2014)

 I've been experimenting with clay and my collection of Afghani fabric presses.  There is something so wonderful about putting these antique presses, all cut by hand, to use again - they have so much spirit or mana in them.  This piece is dedicated to WATER, which is so important here in the desert.  Without the blessings of the Lady of the Waters, there is no life.

Lady of the Desert Spring

Nuestra Senora de las Aguas,

Our lady of the Arroyo,

Come quietly to us,

Come to us, and hear our prayers,

For  those who suffer thirst,

Spread your mantle of green and turquoise

 Among the red, parched lands

Bright artery of life

Nuestra Señora de las Aguas

Mother of the cottonwoods, the Palos verdes,

Snake and mallow, coyote and child

Hear our prayers

O desert spring,

Our lady of the  waters.

Tile made from antique Afghani fabric press (2014)

The Song of the Dry River

Dry.  All you hear

 is the litany of traffic,

a dusty haze obscuring the distance.

Nothing sounds now

where once water  sang

among the stones,

voices of the living

where once a river ran

a river, once, here

before  cattle came,

 the cars

the mines

living as if the waters

would always flow

to green the red and barren lands

as if the breast would never run dry.

As if  there none yet unborn

Who must know  thirst.

Are there only stones

And pottery shards

Left to remember me?

I sing to their  ghosts now,

I sing

where once a river ran .

(2002)

Songs of Ancient Midwives and other Arisings

This piece is brand new (as of Christmas Eve, 2013).  I don't yet know what to title it:  "Our Lady of _____________?"  I think I'm going to contact a few friends and request a title, and see if  Her archetypal name is floating around out there somewhere.

But there is a surprising sense of Arising in these Icons that  I've felt compelled to finish  these past few weeks.  The Arising of the life-giving, creation-giving Goddess, arising from the past, arising from the mythic body of the Earth, arising from the shadows in this time of need.  And now that I think about it, this day is about the birth of the new Sun God, the Christ Child..............

So why, when I searched the internet, was it so hard to find any poems about Birth, let alone Midwives?  Believe me, there are plenty of poems about Battle and the glories, or not so glorious, realities of War.  I think this is another indicator of our world's  patriarchal priorities (death is way more important, and interesting, than the bringing forth of life.  And even that becomes trivialized or co-opted.) 

Anyway, these works surfaced from the depths of my own creativity, and some dreaming part of me, some collective part of me, had to bring them forth...............

 "Sings with the Voices of Ancient Midwives the Songs They Once Sang, Singing the New Life Into The World.........."

"Shrine for the Ancient Midwives"

"Bloom Where You Are Icon"

"Reliquary for the Flight of a Phoenix"

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

.

.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