Portfolio: "A Work in Progress" .... a Presentation at 2022 Pagan Studies Conference

I was embarroused to see that I never shared on this Blog the Presentation I was honored to give at the Conference on Current Pagan Studies ** (via Zoom) in January of this year.  Their Theme for 2022 was "Pagans and Creativity" so I offered a presentation on my own 50 years of being an artist, with (obviously visible) Pagan roots and Pagan iconography even in the very beginning.  It seems Gaia and Myth and the Goddess have been with me almost as soon as I could pick up a crayon, and it't been so ever since.  

https://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/lauren-raine-portfolio-a-work-in-progress

Lauren raine portfolio a work in progress from Lauren Raine

** There will be another Conference this year January 14- 15, 2023

For information on the upcoming Conference:  https://www.paganconference.com/

"Our Lady of the Shards"..............Remembering Buried Lives

"The Memory Keeper" and "Our Lady of the Forgotten Midwives" (2019)

For quite a long time now I go into the studio faithfully just about every day, and I sit there, sometimes I fool around on the computer, mostly I look at all the terrifying blank white  canvases or the neatly stacked bags of clay or the big pile of leather I have next to the plaster casts of faces, also neatly stacked and displayed on a shelf ...... then I go get some coffee, pat the cats, pull some weeds,  check my email,  and somehow, the day is pretty much gone and I haven't done anything.  I wish I could say that I am an engine of new ideas and creativity these days, but I am not.  I am, perhaps, dormant, incubational, etc.  More of my own words coming back to haunt me.  

"Our Lady of the Shards" (2013)

So, at least,  I can look back at this rather huge body of work(s) that surround me (and if I were wealthy I would have a gallery again, where I and others would have  badly needed space to share our art, and we could do the teaching and community  creation that an arts district provides)..... but, I don't live in a place where art districts are much valued, except by real estate developers.   Tucson's so called "Art and Warehouse District", having once been lively, should now be called the "Fancy Wine Bar and Pretentious Restaurant" district, most of the galleries being now extinct.  Well.  If wishes were fishes.................

The Memory Keeper I (2018)

I don't know about other artists, but I always have about 3 to 5 series of works going at a time, and can't really say where one series ends and another begins.  Sometimes they begin with me just playing with a shape or a color, and the work itself tells me where it wants to go.  Magical, that experience of "Flow".  Stories themselves don't have an end, they just find new expressions -  they become a "trilogy", or a side character demands attention because it has developed a voice, or there is an undiscovered country beyond the borders that has sent out an exploration party, etc.  That is true in other art forms as well.

"The Weaver" (2018)

The Bone Goddess (2018)

I really love my continuing  series of ceramic ICONS "Our Lady of the Shards"  that evolved when I found myself staring at a pile of  beautiful shards of broken pots from the Clay Coop where I sometimes work.  They were half buried in the mound of recycled clay, and I thought of  how archeologists might feel, sorting through the buried fragments  of lives and cultures  long lost, long buried, long forgotten.  Piecing shards together like a jigsaw puzzle to find the stories and see again the hands that made those artifacts?   How would it be, to see the faces of the forgotten rising from the buried past?  And, for me,  particularly the voices of the women, silenced in the long advance of "his-story" - the forgotten Midwives who brought our ancestors into the world, the Wise Women and the Weavers and Spinners of lives, the Goddesses cast aside in patriarchal monotheism?   The  tangible and communicative Spirits of Place, the "Numina", rising from the buried places, from the dry and broken soil of desert arroyos where they continue to sustain us,  or revealed by a storm or a sudden flood.  The Memory Keepers who keep the essential and sustaining stories, the "Water from Another Time"  that generates and informs the present?  Whether buried intentionally or not, these faces rise from the dreaming Earth, from the clay and the stone,  their eyes opening as they wake again. 

"Hecate" (2019)

What might they look like?  What might they tell us as we plunge into a future that seems so  uncertain in the face of ecological and social crisis?   I have been making works about "surfacing" for a long time.   Along with my colleagues I reflect that some of us are  "spiritual archeologists".  Faces, Myths, Presence:  surfacing from among the shards.  

"The Black Madonna" (2019)

 

"Our Lady of the Waters" (2014)

"The Human Heart"........a poem by Campbell McGrath

"The Heart Sutra" (2009)

THE HUMAN HEART

We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,
ochre, graph paper,
a funnel of ghosts, whirlpool
in a downspout full of midsummer rain.

It is, for all its freedom and obstinacy,
an artifact of human agency
in its maverick intricacy,
its chaos reflected 
in earthly circumstance.

Its appetites mirrored by a hungry world
like the lights of the casino
in the coyote's eye. Old
as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,

filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,
fashioned from moonlight,
yarn, nacre, cordite,
shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,

and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.
We build the human heart
and lock it in its chest

and hope that what we have made can save us.


Campbell McGrath

"A House of Doors"............Lithographs from the 80's

"Leda and the Swan" (1985)

Another artifact from the recent excavation of my life as an artist (where have I been?  How did I get here?) ........this portfolio of  Lithographs I did in the mid 1980's. I remember how much I loved being in the litho room, grinding the big stones.  The images were mostly drawn a collection of old photographs of my family I found, my mother as a child, my grandmother I never knew..........they haunted me, these people and that brief moment caught in black and white and then gone, lost, relics, artifacts, stories, mysteries.   The entire collection was called "A HOUSE OF DOORS"  and I wrote a poem that went with them, that eventually became a performance piece.  I worked so hard on them............and only showed them once.  

"A House of Doors" (1985)

"Day of Radience" (1985)

"Some rooms diminish, some rooms compress

Rooms can be tricky.

What I chiefly remember are doors

I live in a house of doors."

"Icarus Had a Sister" (1985)

"Persistence of Memory" (1985)

"Dream II" (1985)

"Dream" (1985)

"Winter's Dream" (1985)

"Ancestral Visitation" (1986)

"When Rain Sang" (1985)

I Remember white dresses I wore.
I can't remember the girl's name.

"Funny", she said, "How time
 takes the names out of things,
and bleaches the rest kind of transparent."

Funny. Chiefly,
I remember doors."

"Streetcar" (1986)

Midwives

Ancestral Midwives (2013)

I was thinking of my friend Lorie, who provided the hands for this sculpture.  Lorie retired just a few years ago from a long career as a midwife in Pittsburgh, and when I asked to cast her hands she assumed this pose, which she told me is a hand gesture used to symbolize midwifery.   To have spent so many years bringing new life into the world! 

New Old Work........

Persephone

Last spring I began a series of 4 masks, inspired by a friend who wished to use them for a ritual theatre process based upon the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece.  We don't know exactly what occured in the Mysteries, because participants were forbidden to tell what occured - "Mystery" derives from a work that means "that which cannot be spoken".  But the  Eleusinian Mysteries  combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims as they  enacted the death/rebirth cycle of nature, based upon the Triple Goddess Demeter/Persephone/Hecate  for almost 2,500 years, and probably longer, as, like many places of pilgrimage today, the origins go back far into prehistory. 

I wanted to try to make the masks look old, and tried to imagine what they might have looked like as painted Greek masks..........these don't really look much like ancient Greek masks at all, but I like them anyway.  They were recently used by a ritualist in California, so they have some energy instilled in them and I hope they'll "travel" to others who might want to use them to explore these important myths.
 

Demeter

Hades

Hecate

I've written quite often about Hecate, the Underworld Goddess who bears two Torches to assist Persephone, and the immature unconscious parts of all of us, through the Underworld to mature empowerment - here's a recent post.

Hecate

Persephone

Here's another recent variation..............Demeter aren't done yet.  But I had fun making the masks look "bronze".  I like the idea of these masks, and the other sculptures that seem related, really looking sculptural, with a heavy, strong, dark,  metal presence. 

Black Madonna

Here's an other theme that keeps arising, and it's good to come back to these images, play with them again.  The Primal Black Madonna, Earth Mother, Gaia, the Source that sustains us all.

Transformer:  Yin and Yang

I love these paper casts of a dead snake that I found years ago and made a plaster cast of.  Snakes were very sacred in ancient times as a symbol of the renewal of life because the snake sheds its skin.  Snakes also represented the serpentine movements of nature, the spiral of the Goddess that moves through nature's cycles, through life/death/rebirth again and again.  The Snake is identified with Demeter and Persephone, and in ancient Egypt the word for snake or cobra was the same as the word for female deity.

I did this "Skin Shedder Mandala" back in 1986, when I was studying "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk as a graduate student at the U.A.  A lot of people found it dark or grim............but I still love it.  

The Black Madonna (2013)

Black Madonna earlier version...............

  And I'm having fun making these variations on the Torso .................... I guess the next one is a "copper patina" effect.  Good to be in the studio again, having my discussions, in the symbol language of art I think, with the Dark Goddesses of  Winter....................

Cast of sculpture from IPark in 2005

Raukkadesa

Out beyond ideas
of wrong doing and right doing,
there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language
- even the phrase "each other" -
do not make any sense.

From The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks.

When you do a lot of driving, without a radio or tape player, you either find yourself becoming very, very bored, or you make a meditation of it.  I guess, being such a nomad over the years, driving has become my form of meditation, and I do some of my best thinking with the white line unrolling before me.  It's a good metaphor, isn't it?   

I found the word "raukkadessa"  often popped into my  mind this summer, and I've made notes for an entry that never seems to be able to be finished.  "Raukkadessa" is a shamanic  concept, one that I was introduced to in 2004 by singer and songwriter Kathi Huhtaluhta.   The word came from a song on her album  Beyond Love  (Sami Records, 2004).  Kathi  lived in Finland,   where she studied "Yoik" traditions of Sami chanting.  But she also became very influenced by Sami folklore and spirituality while there.

Kathy told me her song, Raukkadessa, derived from a word she learned  which meant "beyond love".  Meaning, beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond loss, conflict,  history, the constructs of personality and culture, beyond even our temporal experience of love (or hate)....."there is a field". 

And perhaps the purposes of that  exchange, or that experience, are unintelligible in temporal terms, lie beneath, or above, the surfaces of our lives............I don't know.   I think of my friends song, of  "Raukkadesa", and sometimes it  has helped me to let go of anger, regret, blame or loss, and accept the mysteries of my life, to appreciate, if not always understand, the evolutionary pattern.  

I remember an artist  I met in California who told me, quite seriously, that she believed she had been collaborating creatively with a man in New Jersey for 40 years.  She said she had never met him, and probably never would.  

I've often found that people have given me gifts that take time and maturity to understand. 
Recently I had a month of conflict with a roommate, which was, of course, very uncomfortable, and full of the judgemental polarization of "she's wrong, she's crazy" etc.  It was exhausting. As it turned out, she really did need her own space, and we were a poor match as roommates.  But for me, she provided me with some important growth and self-understanding, because I had to come to grips with ways that I was being unsympathetic, judgemental, possessive about the space, and unkind to someone who, I began to realize, was quite fragile.  After all the blustering, I had to take a look at that very uncomfortable place of  remorse for my behavior.  When I finally got it, I decided I needed to do what I could to put things right, and I helped her in various ways to find a new place.  Ultimately, we parted in a friendly manner.  And I have some satisfaction that it was a win-win situation in the end.  A gift.

What we call "forgiveness", I find, mostly has to do with forgiving myself.  It's much easier to forgive others.  The word "fore-give" means to give the energy forward, to not constrict oneself in time and place.   At some moments, one sees that what happened was a  node in the Web, and they were there, co-creators,  all the time.  The threads others wove for and with me become an important motif in the tapestry of my life.  But the pattern is only visible with an overview, if it's ever consciously visible at all.     I don't like the term "guidance", I prefer the word "Conversation".   Beyond the immediacies of our  sequential lives, "there is a field"  where the Conversation goes on within the  stories of our lives. 

 I STOOD POISED UPON THE EDGE OF TOWN,
AND HEARD THE BLUE STARS  SINGING

Weary ideas rise and fall
into blessed exhaustion.
I touch that essence,
that blood-red honey wine,
this strange distillation.

I entered a lucid dream,
I found a lucid life.

Through my open window, I see
a black, far horizon,
and I hear the blue stars singing
memories of memories

I wish I could tell you
what I have seen
in the homelands.

Perhaps, in that country,
we are of each other at last......
You take my hand, we walk together
in that green and splendid
meadow.
I offer you a glass,
you raise your cup to mine
a butterfly rises between us,
flies into the morning
from the other side
of forever.

Through an open window,
I hear the stars singing.......
But I write this in a small, dark room
here, and now,
wishing I could be young again,
wishing I could feel
something other than foolish.

I will always remember you
between
always between

(2002)

Some New Masks.......

"AURORA (Dawn)"

 My friend Ann Waters is organizing a ritual event for the Winter Solstice, and as we have worked together with masks in the past, I'm delighted that she and her group are doing so again.  So these PERSONAE for the dawning of a  New Age arose from my imagination.

Dawn, of course.

"OUR LADY OF CHAOS AND ORDER"

 And these two Personae that speak, to me at least, about the cycling of all dualities, their ultimate union.  Things are ordered, things fall apart.  I think this will be the first study I'll do on "Shadow" masks, because I believe that integration of the shadow is so vital to our time, integrating balance.***

'PERSEPHONE"

Persephone, Greek Goddess of the underworld and wife of Hades, the God of Death, is also the maiden daughter of Demeter, the bringer of Spring.  In the natural world spring becomes summer, becomes fall, and becomes the darkness of winter.  And from that ending comes new life again in the Spring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 ***From "Myths and Dreams"( http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/majorarchetypes.html)

Painting by Christina Carbone

"Jung's formulation of the concept of the archetype he called the `Archetype of Wholeness', or the Self, is fundamental to Jungian or analytical psychology. The self has to be distinguished from the ego. The ego is the conscious mind. The self is the total, fully integrated psyche, in which all opposing or conflicting elements are united and co-ordinated. Bear in mind what Jung says about the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the unconscious contains the opposite characteristics or capabilities to those that are evident at the conscious level of the personality (e.g. if you are the extrovert type your unconscious will be introvert). At this final stage of individuation conscious and unconscious become so thoroughly integrated into one harmonious whole that those things that were previously opposites and therefore - potentially, at least - in conflict are transformed.  Jung described this state of self-realization as follows:
"This widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes and ambitions which has always to be compensated or corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead, it is a .... relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding and indissoluble communion with the world at large."

Descanso: Shrine for Extinct and Endangered Species

 Dia de los Muertos:  "Reliquary for the 6th Extinction"

Xerces Blue Butterfly, indigenous to Northern California.  Became extinct in 1945.

 

"We have been raised to think that our body ended here, with this bag of skin, or with our possessions or education or house.  Now we begin to realize that our body is the world."

Joanna Macy 

Bonobo, Africa, critically endangered

Ivory Billed Woodpecker, native to Southeaster U.S., last seen in 1944

Red Crowned Crane, indigenous to southeast Asia, critically endangered

  
African Elephant, critically endangered

 
Cheetah, Africa, critically endangered

 

Staghorn coral, Caribbean and Bahamas coral reef, critically endangered

 

Only in this hoarded span will love  persevere.   

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you

bend down my strange face to yours 

Anne Sexton, "all my pretty ones"