EARTH BODY / DREAM PORTAL

‍

EARTH BODY / DREAM PORTAL is a series of experiments exploring what it means to feel my body connected to the Earth. It is a practice in opening the body up as a portal, into feeling viscerally, corporeally, what it means to be intricately embedded into the living landscape. To contemplate the body as a portal means that we are conduits for other energies to pass through and express themselves. It also signifies that our thoughts, moods, and creations are always in conversation and collaboration with the unseen energies around us. To claim the body as a portal means that we are part of a wider intelligence: that we are open, porous, amorphous, entanglement. EARTH BODY / DREAM PORTAL is a practice in shapeshifting.

‍

To know that soil is a kind of flesh, and that I too, am made of that same flesh. To feel the power of stone course through my body when I touch it. To breathe into my heart, the textured, glowing green of a mountainside, and feel that energy permeate throughout my entire being. To ask for answers from a river, and be gifted tears in return. 

‍

Portals to Paradise explores the idea of the body as a tool for divination. It imagines how returning to the earth (decomposition) might feel like a kind of rapture. A collision of the past and the future, of beginnings and endings happening simultaneously. This painting visualizes how we are part of the Earth’s creation process. It postulates that Earth has consciousness, and that we are part of this consciousness. Portals to Paradise also depicts a binary. This visual binary imagines and prompts further investigations into the archetypes and programs that are embedded into us. A kind of unconscious perceptual discord that has happened in our relating to the natural world. There is also a handprint depicting/illustrating the power and agency of human creativity. It is also a reference to the cave paintings of the early humans, which is something I think a lot about. I like to imagine the deep poetry and magic that may have occurred when early humans touched the cave wall and felt something speaking to them. How the act of marking their hands on the wall embedded themselves into it. 

‍

Painting is an energetic container,

A means to make time malleable (to reclaim it as our own), 

It is a bridge connecting inner and outer worlds, 

A way to bring forth form from the unseen world. 

To paint is to participate in the natural processes of birth, growth, change, death.

To paint is to revel in the process of shapeshifting,

To feel transformations happening within, and in the painting,

a way through which we can transform ourselves,

through which we can recreate ourselves, 

die and be born over and over again.

‍

To speak aloud my dream is a powerful act!

My dream: I am deeply connected to my body, to the Earth.

I am entwined, rooted, embedded into the Earth!

I co-dream with the Earth.

I am able to hear and sing its song.

I am able to transmute Earthmagic!

I discern and feel its moods… its terrors, love, hope.

Artmaking has become this magical process of alchemizing these dreams.

How powerful it is to give form to feelings!

‍