Wobbling the Paradigm, Marking into Being: The Underworld
Wobbling the Paradigm: Beyond Marking and From the Field utilize various markings and printed materials to allow the literal and metaphoric layering to express new levels of collaboration with the field. The most recent work pieces acknowledge the relinquishing adornments key to the Underworld journey. actualizes the developmental of the process by using basic materials in new ways extending Wobbling the Paradigm to Marking into Being.
The Underworld like all mythological realms is layered over our everyday reality and yet is not named as such until it blindsides us. Moving from the challenge of trauma into mythos is a different journey than going from understanding of the mythic realm into adversity. The mind can discount the Underworld at our finger tips but our body knows when we enter, be it the DMV, a divorce or critical care. There are different ways to navigate, but it helps to know the terrain and the currency. In Underworld we enter consciously the mythic dimension through winter by preparing with shattering, dissolving, relinquishing adornments of identity. This gallery is from that experience.
Underworld: Paintings from Somatic-Imagery
This was an experiment in creative process to shift in scale from paper substrate to large canvases using monoprint collage, blackboard paint, cold wax and oil paint. The fundamental approach is the ancient art of shape-shifting, becoming like other in order to expand awareness by embodied experience, often increasing understanding and lack of understanding. There was an exploration of ancestors, as well as making more conscious the presence of guides and mentors.
Underworld: Blackboard Series
The Blackboard Series came from an Imaginal Journey into the gaze of a large Leather-back Sea Turtle. A dense blackboard kind-of-void surrounds me that I could mark and erase. It also felt to be marking and erasing in me.
As it happens blackboard-ness can be purchased at the hardware store in pints. The three paintings on canvas, Creative Wellspring—Hawaiian Dancer, Slip-of-Self—a Garment and Sumo Wrestler are framed with a mathematical equation/diagram that the blackboard surface invited.
-Wellspring of Time
Image of Wellspring, experienced on Molokai as spirit of demi-urge grounded not to the earth but through it. With feet planted, head back, weight is lifted off by breasts tossed into the air. The formula for Dreamtime/ Sacred Time will not fit into a linear time continuum. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf created a diagram with the sacred circle of Dreamtime running along the surface of time inferring where it touches is the now of awareness.
(fig. #1) Dreamtime and Now on linear time continuum. (fig. #2) Dreamtime as circle moving along a surface of time.
-Slip of Self, A Qubit
Slip-of-Self, a temporal flimsy, transparent garment is a shadow in transit. It suggests the possibility of a self not identified with a binary continuum but creatively engaged with the unknown. Rendered on a blackboard to solicit a formula outside the computer model so fundamental to our ways of perceiving and thinking.
(The diagram is of a non-binary computer, functioning not on memory but possibility—a qubit. It is not the bit space we know so well moving in one of two ways, vertically or across horizontally. The qubit arrows moves to the-in-between spaces—to the maybe.
-Sumo, Formula of Uncertainty
Sumo wrestling takes place in a sacred circle, in 14th C Shinto ritual to entertains the gods with games of balance, playing with improbity. It is considered a form of purification in the arena of the relationship to uncertainty between dualities.
In the painting there is the electric blue hand of uncertainty that also emerges in Wellspring f Time. Is there a formula for Uncertainty? Research biologist Michael Dickinson working with drosophila, fruit flies on decision-making is working on this mathematical formula.
(fig.) Uncertainty equals absolute value times impact times cost minus benefit. U=abs (I—(C – B)).
Underworld: Playing in the Ante-Room
Holding both the Underworld and everyday life at the same time is a skill that takes cultivating. The space in between is a place of preparation and reflection. Adornments, as aspects of identity, are shed on entrance into the depth that will change with each journey. It is important to know what it means to pay the ferryman, to enter the gates.
Underworld: Touched by San Miguel de Allende
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico sits carved out of indigenous material with the tools of 15th century Spanish colonialization. Ringing cathedral bells bring Los Indigos brightly dressed to market day to sell their wares to European ex-pats who balance the drug cartels in an uneasy alliance. Like what is not said in many other cities, here it comes to our fingertips from every surface. This is a place of texture—tactile, haptic—physical, emotional, cultural and historical that pours in like braille with information past the sight-dominated orientation. The marking retreat in San Miguel posed many more questions than it answered exposing colonialization as a form of the Underworld.
