New Series Forms: In-Bodying the Field

Where is that X in the YOU ARE HERE? In your head? In your body? And how well acquainted are you with that body, anyway? Is it a vessel, a medical diagram, your home? For most of us the body is inextricably bound with the location of who we think we are. And although body is usually the core of our primary relational-field we only know it by bits and pieces of medical needs or encounters with physical intimacy, both good and bad. Is our body contained inside the skin, and if so then what is outside is other? How well is this knowing the body working out for us? How is your identification with body aiding or hindering the greater journey? Would you like to find a more coherent way to live in your body as integral to the greater whole?

In January 2022 Studio Anavami will begin a series, Mark-Making: In-Bodying the Field, Exploration of the most Intimate Field, with the intention to explore our identification with the body. We will be using mark-making as medium to explore the unconscious beliefs of our inherited self and mark-making as conduit to explore the learning-body as process. Each session we will be initiating experientially into of the functions and relationships of different aspects of body-ness. These are some of the things that we will cover in support to develop curiosity, creativity and a new sense of coherence in relation to identity: yielding, gravity, biomorphic expression, landing and locating, participating with our organizing intelligence, proprioceptive awareness, boundaries, edges, thresholds, patterns and process. We will use a variety of marking approaches with basic water-soluble marking implements as well as mark transfers, printing, subtraction of marks and invisible marks. This exploration will allow a deeper level for those involved in the last few years and an introduction to participants who are coming to know this approach.

We have been taught conceptually to be artificially alienated from the biosphere that supports us. This separate-self has us viewing the body as a machine metaphor where we tend to think in separate parts like liver, arm, mind, but this is not the whole picture. Body is a dynamic system for which we barely have the descriptive language to express, let alone understand how all the pieces fit.

As we mark with, into and through the body we begin to experience the physical us as no longer just an object. Nora Bateson comes to our aid in articulating a concept of this kind of function with the word symmanathesy, a living system highlighting expression and communication of interdependency. In particular she says that what is key is the phenomena of mutual learning. In this series we will explore marking as a conduit for communication, information exchange and expression—a mutual learning through mark-making.

The components in Mark-Making: In-Bodying the Field support this marking adventure begins with yielding. Yielding often misunderstood as a passive surrendering or a ‘doing nothing,’ is a responsive relationship. It is a physical expression of and support for emotional and social bonding first experienced in relation to the body of mother and earth. It is our first experience of gravity that we will also explore as a radical way of perceiving the body through experiential knowing. We will overcome the remnant of the body as mechanical apparatus and let go of the separation of the mind, releasing our old language to build a new vocabulary.

We will embrace Body as symmanathesy and allow for a new kind of body organization as it refers to living systems. Systems which emerge from the communications and interactions, a relational response, in what Nora Bateson calls mutual learning, boundaries are interfaces of learning. It is so complex that there are no parts and wholes.  At one point she says, Art may be the only way to truly describe living complexity.  

Marking approaches thus facilitates a deeper experience of expression, communication and mutual learning where the body is not a vessel but a fluid element in the cosmic ocean that we are. There is an archetypal and mythical dimension developmentally which resonates with our egos in function and dysfunction shedding light on new possibilities for understanding a greater context. We have become a definitive force on this planet and need to create an opening for coherence rather than separation. This series of marking from the body is a way to become intimate with ourselves, not as object but as constantly moving process. In mark-making we begin to create a different relationship to matter and therefore to everything, animate and inanimate.

Through marking the insights and new connections have a somatic anchoring in the body so it would seem that the body is the best place to begin the query of new realities that may be covered by old beliefs. January will begin Mark-making: In-Bodying the Field with the Marking Vocabulary Sylllabus is a prerequisite for Janurary. Let me know your interest.

In A Time of Story & Poetry

Open Studio Tours is coming up, October 9 & 10. I am showing work like I have never done before, something fresh and unconventional.  And it is not just me in the studio this year, there will be pieces by four Marking Circles participants that will give you an idea of how unusual this process of Wobbling the Paradigm really is.

The approach we are using may be audacious, but that is what is called for in this time. The work is not a product, nor even finished pieces in the usual sense. They are an exploration in the relational-field that is recorded in marks. As a good haiku poem evokes something beyond consensus reality these connect to the mystery. There is a lot of talk about paradigm shift and how it is needed to resolve the problems that we have created. But how well do we recognize that we can’t see beyond our own paradigm? Let alone envisioning what another one might be. We need to mix up old patterns, visualize the world as us, block out the noise and recognize the radical new organizing principle is not something outside of us but rather seeds held within our current paradigms that have, as yet, gone unrecognized.

The approach to marking we have been experimenting with rattles the concept of story. Yes, story is so much a part of who we are and what we do as people. It is our history, our mistakes and growth, and our vision of what can be. But story is often used to cement everything into place, the good, the bad and the ugly as if all of those are defined.  We need to look at story as developing, weaving and undulating, fluid enough for us to embrace possibilities. Science, interestingly, is a good example of this. It is not a steady stream of developing concepts, even though our high school textbooks would have you think so. We have been radically wrong in our presumptions many times. New information arises, old theories fade and new ones overshadow the old. It is the same with child raising and political ideas. The continuum of stories we live by do change fundamentally. While stories, personal and collective will always be with us, at times leaps in consciousness poetry is more of what we need.

Deena Metzner, poet and author, contrasts poem and story, describing a poem as a penetration into the essence of something. A poem expresses the inexpressible adventure deeply. Story and prose, spread out, wanting to speak to the mind, to the intellect. The horizontal gathers information, technique, momentum, while the vertical is outside of time, it changes our life as participant. Jane Hirshfield, Poet Laureate, tell us poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Poetry creates a vertical experience, an evocative and in-depth exploration.

In the studio, we have been using haiku in our marking as a practice to evoke the not quite articulatable beyond the edge. It points to something we intimately know. We all feel it when a haiku is successful. In that case it doesn’t just tell another story of everyday life or things in nature. It provokes a pause that startles. It suggests a much wider context. And although it is easier to sense in the haiku, it is a different matter to create it.

Stories can be true poetry and much of poetry is really story. What I am interested in is how this translates to the visual arts: visual, literary and performance, and anything in daily life that reaches the stage of art. This was hard to get until these poets helped me to understand and articulate it. Much of our visual arts is story, but we feel it when it moves into poetry. Much of the markings of those participating in Marking from the Relational-Field and Beyond Marking circles edge on that poetic quality.

Come see all this for yourself at the first Open Studios weekend, October 9 & 10 on the westside off Swift, 2593 Mission Street Extension.  After being inspired you can also join in at an introductory workshop, Expanding Sensual Connections Through Mark-Making, being offered on Saturday October 23rd at Anavami Studio on the westside of Santa Cruz and on Zoom. From blogs and newsletters, you have been hearing about Wobbling the Paradigm and, more specifically, Marking Emerging from the Field but it has not been available beyond a small group of participants. So now is the time for you to join in on this new mark-making approach. Explore through mark-making the aliveness and inter-relation of everything around us. We will play with cross-referencing our senses in terms of mark-making with three intentions. One is to extend the way we perceive and translate out relationship to ourselves and environment beyond our everyday habits. Two, is open mark-making, a dialogue with the relational-field, that is the marking materials, physical environment, memories/histories and relationship and to what is most concerning or inspiring in the greater world. And three is to tweak our consensus reality. This last one happens subtly over time, but one session will give you a taste.

Lenses to Explore Being: Present to How Things Are

In an optometrist office when being fitted for glasses there is an array of lenses used to refine one’s vision correction. The doctor keeps asking, “which one is better, this one or this one? What a metaphor. Throughout our life there is a constant checking to see that we are viewing the world in the correct way, as those with whom we identify. It is understandable then that how we see the world is greatly influenced by program beliefs. In our retreat to San Miguel de Allende we will be exploring how to be Present to How Things Are, not how we might initially perceive them. The three lenses we will using are taken from Ken Wilber’s essay, Eyes of the Artist: Art and the Perennial Philosophy. It is found at the beginning of the book of the visionary artist Alex Grey’s artwork, Sacred Mirrors.

Wilber defines the first lens as sensibilia, how we perceive through the body with our five senses. Intelligibilia, the second lens, is how we perceived through the mind and transcendilia is when we use soul and spirit to perceive. In the making the artist uses one, two or all three. How the work is perceived, though, will depend on the perceptual capacity of the viewer. As we know many artist’s works are not appreciated, that is seen in their time. Just as the perception of images change in time so does our perception of the world. Images, music and poetry are part of the human language speaking beyond the verbal. The practice of mark-making is a way to consciously extend our perception and expression knowing it as a conversation with the materials, as well as everything with which we are in relation-the world. It is a collaboration, as we find we are not a sole agent.

In our upcoming week in San Miguel de Allende we will be using these lenses in our mark-marking as we first go into the material world to heighten and cultivate the world of the senses. Come with us on the journey, as we are all traveling anyway.  The beginning of the journey will be our first traveling day and the last one at the end will be good indicators of how much our perceptions have changed. Traveling day moves the body with belongings through space. We will go the airport, stand in line and sit for many hours. You will travel in your everyday routine but this is also the opportunity for  us to tune into how our senses apprehend the world. What catches our attention? What do we ignore? What gives us comfort or discomfort? Can we release the judging mind and just be aware of what we are sensing in the moment through our senses? We will land in a new place and you in your familiar places. Our return travel will indicate how our perceptions have changed.

In San Miguel, on the city tour we will take our marking materials to help focus on the senses by recording sensory impressions with rubbings of textures and patterns and markings of sounds and smells. It will be a challenge for us to not let the mind jump in with presumptions and habits of perceiving. From breakfast to bed we will become more and more aware, heightening our reception and expression of sensory data. By marking we interact with this data in new ways, tracking and sharing with each other to excite and inspire novel possibilities of being with and apprehending matter. In this way we will become more sensitive to what we miss and why. Our adventure out into the world will be anchored with days in the studio to consider and compare with each other our perceptions as we re-configure pieces of our collected markings and impressions on a larger substrate. Our intent is not to make an object but see what arises from our collaboration.

The morning at the Hot Springs we begin to consciously enter intelligibilia noting how symbols, memories, projections and creations through the mind are a dominant feature of our world. Relaxing in the waters encourages musings of the imaginal world, which is often the entry into transcendilia. We will begin to tease out how much of our mind is connected to our senses, moving in sensibilia into intelligibilia. What does it take to create a city, a cathedral, a meal, or a painting. What does it take to turn vision into matter. Who is involved in this process? On our ventures out for lunch we notice, who is serving, who is being served. Where and by whom the food is being grown, harvested and prepared. How is something like history transferred? How is it perceived and noted in our markings?

In the artisan market, whether fine craftmanship or folk art, we are looking for the quality beyond the lenses of sensibilia and intelligibilia. Transcendilia is often subtle in how it evokes something all encompassing, palpable yet hard to describe. Without the lens of rational thought, expectations and conditioning the soul slips in that is hidden from normal state of mind. Marking helps to extend that conversation, becoming less and less bound to narrow conventions of the understandable.

The locals say just by visiting San Miguel you will most probably come home with something special. It is a place known to stimulate transcendilia. Some carry home colors, others an atmosphere of ancient times or sense of sacred land. But signs of the spirit and soul of place is everywhere when you are available, be it your regular routine or San Miguel de Allende. Transcendental is beyond all conceptual or theoretical framework, pointing us to our creative source. We must rely on ourselves, gazing into our own souls for inspiration and guidance, as we recognize and connect through our world. Enjoy your return travel day after several days of exploration.