My Interview on LITTLE GIFTS Podcast

"A Mask for Talking to the Ancestors" (2024)

 Very pleased with this conversation I had in LITTLE GIFTS Podcast in May, with the wonderful grandmother and granddaughter team of the extraordinary artist Sue Ellen Parkinson and her amazing granddaughter Savannah Wonderwheel.

We talked about, well, what I mostly talk about: the Goddess, masks, magic, and healing in a difficult world. And I love that the conversation spans generations! Thank you to both of them!

 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2J1rqRrdqoGptj7PwjzOag

"A Mask for Shattering Old Paradigms" (2024)

"A Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (2022)

"A Mask for Chaos and Order" (2024)

The Tucson Sculpture Festival March 16 and 17, 2024

 

I will be there!  This year in addition to clay sculpture I decided to bring some masks which also can be presented as sculptures in their own rights.......... Masks are also wearable, and thus endlessly open for collaboration and story!  

                                              

                                                A Mask for the Shattering of Old Paradigms

Green Man

 

Butterfly Woman

 

Monarch

Persephone

                           All artwork and text unless otherwise specified is COPYRIGHT Lauren Raine 2024

A Few New Masks

Mermaid (2021)

 Still like to keep my hand in................thinking about opening an ETSY store in the Spring, so that I at least have a place to show new work. Tucson doesn't really have any galleries that would be interested in my work; maybe I should see if there are opportunities in Santa Fe?   I wish I had people here to work with the masks and find their stories and their gestures.  Too isolated these days...........

Quon Yin (2021)

Ceres (2021)

New Works.......Elemental Touch, The River, and Shaman Masks

Looks like it was a good idea to take my own advice (in the previous Interview post) , having been avoiding the studio for months and feeling the Holiday Blues as the days are short and dark.  I went into the studio, forced myself to work, and low and behold, FLOW has kicked back in and I am full of ideas once more.  

I started casting hands back in 2007 when I had an Alden B. Dow Fellowship at Northwood University in Michigan, and with ceramic artist Kathy Space we created a community arts project based on  the legend of the Spider Woman that I called "Spider Woman's Hands" which was shown at the Midland Arts Center.  Each participant made an Icon that was composed of a cast of their hand or hands, something significant to them as a personal symbol, and the entire exhibit of "Icons" was united by a "thread" that was held in each hand and extended to the next.  At last the Thread went right out the door, to represent our connection to all others and all life.   The Creative Spirit Center in Midland Michigan went on to repeat the Project, with Kathy Space and Space Studio. In 2009 I was Resident Artist at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C., and continued casting hands and pursuing "Spider Woman's Hands" with the community there with a sculpture called "Weavers".

                                 

I've been creating sculptures with casts of peoples hands ever since. Many of them seem to be rooted, another metaphor that repeats for me.   Here's an article I wrote back in 2009 about hands, and the "Hand and Eye" which fascinates me.  I guess  I would say that hands are as individual as faces, they age like the rings of a tree, and are full of the stories of what those hands have created and touched.  We touch the world, we "handle" the world, we create and caress and are active participants with World with our hands.  Hands go beyond the abstractions of the mind, abstractions that often remove us from the sensuous and the actual experience of being alive.   And hands can also represent the active and creative force in nature and in the cosmos - the "Hand of the Divine".                                

This is for a friend who is recently divorced, after a long and somewhat abusive marriage.  The butterflies represent the transformation she is now making in her life, the new life she is creating for herself.

Four Shaman Masks: 
 The Oracle (East), The Healer (West) The Maker (South)
 "Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (Center)

This  Series began with finding a drawing for the mask below, with the title, in a very old sketchbook, and feeling like, after some 20 years, it was time to make the mask.   Then the other masks followed, and I began to realize that they were related to the elements.  The last mask for North I have not made yet.  They need story, and I wish the right people would show up who can do just that, who will "activate" them. 

Surely, they must have been made for someone..................

"Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (2020)

New Masks that Await Their Stories

"Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions (Center)"

Years ago I heard a famous Hopi potter talk about how many of the intricate designs on her bowls just "turn up" in her dreams,  and "bother her" until she makes them, and then they finally leave.  I  was very seriously and academically trying to figure out if  art could be "shamanic" at that time - this very simple explanation of visioning by a revered Native artist stuck with me.  No fuss, no muss, just day to day "instructions" that the artist received and translated into bowls that were full of "mana", full of essence.  

"The Healer (East)"  

It's been many years since then, and I find that I also seem to get "downloads", images that pop into my head, and won't go away until I make them.  I suppose it could be said that I'm a kind of mask shaman, although at present I have no tribe to serve, which I find frustrating.  Still, here is a collection of masks that came from.........well, I don't know where, but they wanted to be made.  I am hopeful that those who can use them, and find their stories, will turn up on the horizon in the future.  

"The Maker (South)"

Because masks are meant to be participatory, "vessels for story, vessels for transformation, vessels for invocation".  As I myself so often have said.................

"The Oracle (West)"

There is one last mask I need to make in the series, for North, and that would be "The Reaper",  the function of psychopomp, the one who helps people to make the transition from this life into the next.  Instead of a skull, I see a face with butterflies all around it. 

More New Masks for my Upcoming Show

BRIDGIT

I've been busy indeed getting ready for my show in May, including finally finishing a new version of  my Book about the Masks of the Goddess Project.  

It is fun to have a chance to practice my mastery of my art.........I have not made many masks in the past few years, mostly because since I stopped doing the shows and "being out there" there have been few requests for masks.  But this is what I am good at, and it has been a great privilege for me to make these Goddess masks for others to use.  

I remember when I first started learning about the "Temple Mask" traditions of Bali, and started working with Ida Bagus Anom in Mas, which is near Ubud.  I was so inspired with the idea of sacred masks, masks that were used to "in-voke" the Gods, masks that were the "special masks" that were kept in the Temples, anointed and cleansed with holy water by the Balians, and maintained and created by a class of mask makers............it seemed so familiar to me, that concept.  Perhaps I once lived in a culture like Bali where masks were sacred, in some other lifetime............

 So when I returned to the U.S., the idea of making a collection of "Temple Masks" devoted to the Divine Feminine made sense to me.  And then my opportunity came along with an invitation to create masks for the Invocation of the Goddess at the 20th Annual Spiral Dance in San Francisco.  It seems fitting indeed that the Project should end in San Francisco as well, 20 years later.  And I am ....... happy to realize that the masks did fulfill that dream, and I have this chance to close with honor for the many people I've been privileged to share them with.

INANNA

CERES/DEMETER 

ISIS

HECATE

ERESHKIGAL

BAST

"Mask and Myth" - My Masks Website

 Since we're a month or so away from Halloween, I thought I should post about my Masks  Websites,  MASK AND MYTH and RAINWALKER STUDIO.   

I still delight in making all kinds of masks for holidays, Renaissance Faires, and Costuming, and commissions are especially  welcome!

Old Masks, New Ceramics

The word Personality is derived from the Latin ‘persona ‘, or ‘mask‘.  In ancient Greece players in the sacred Mystery plays always wore masks.  We can imagine these actors, in the course of the play-cycle which formed the Mystery celebrations, assuming first one mask and then another as roles changed with the play being performed. Thus we might conceive of the immortal soul in the metaphor of life’s Mysteries - assuming first one personality, persona, or mask, then another as it plays its allotted part in the successive Mystery plays which form the changing cycle of spiritual experience."
 Dion Fortune, Metaphysician (1935)

In the course of working this summer, I had many "leftovers", pieces that didn't work or were broken.  Rather than discard them, I saw them as "Shards" as well.  Lying among the shards they were a kind of personal archeology, "artifacts" used and discarded in the course of a lifetime.  So these pieces came from them.  It seemed surprisingly appropriate especially for someone who has had a career as a mask maker...........

We all wear so many masks in the course of a lifetime.  Where, indeed, is "the I", the famous Buddhist question.  It is a profound spiritual metaphor as well - the soul, moving through personalities, experience, lifetimes.  Ultimately, we are not the masks, the "personae" we wear, we are the Journey.  

Medicine Baskets

A Medicine Basket is a container, woven of many strands,  for healing.

I seem to be having a long case of "writers block" (good thing I'm a visual artist and never seem to run out of images).  I'm hoping that anyone who may be reading this blog is not annoyed to discover me doing this.  Recently at Open Studios  I got into a discussion about this mask.  The mask was  involved in a dream the woman who performed it had - what is interesting is that I made the mask before she had the dream!  But we have done this before, and it illustrates the "seamlessness" of creativity.  I called the mask the "Medicine Basket Mask" and subtitled it "Gather and Offer" because of a poem that was given to me by a workshop participant at Kripalu in 2008.  

"Medicine Basket" is such a wonderful term, and embodies the archetypes of  WEAVING,  VESSELS FOR HEALING created from many threads.  I return to the work of Cherokee artist   Shan Goshorn,  as she is a weaver of contemporary   medicine baskets  which she makes in traditional designs and techniques.   They are woven from the words of broken contracts, and the names and photos of children taken from their families and forced to attend boarding schools. “Educational Genocide – The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School” was created with a Cherokee-style double weave, and was made from splints of paper that had student’s names and historical documents and photographs. The artist  weaves together the broken threads of the past to create healing baskets that re-member and re-join.

When I made the mask for my friend Mana Youngbear, she told me that she had dreamed it!  My friend saw in her dream a woman wearing a mask that was a basket, the face emerging from the fibers of the basket.  This image had meaning for me on many levels.  A Medicine Basket is a container, woven of many strands, meant to store or provide forces for healing, understanding, consensus, and offering to the divine, the "greater pattern".   We can create  baskets, sacred containers for  healing or empowerment or memory - the "medicine"  that is needed at a given time, place, for a particular person, or a collective "weaving of the energies" . We are also "baskets" ourselves, our intentions and histories woven into the container of our  lives, and those threads have been woven into the lives of everyone else we've ever known as well.  

"Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman, Weaving the World with the Stories She Dreams" (2008)

Now, as everything seems to be unravelling in a world we've made the mistake of taking for granted,  I feel the compulsion to make a new "Medicine Basket Mask".  The mask I have in mind has an open mouth - it will be less passive and in "dreamtime" as the one above.  This one will speak the weaving, the medicine.  The time for being merely receptive is past, now is the time for us to act, to become "the medicine".   

"Basket Mask" by Ilana Stein (2008)

Another mask came to mind, as I thought of woven personae......that of Ilana Stein, which she called "Gathering and Offering" from the poem she made for her mask when I taught at the Kripalu Institute.  Ilana was a well known midwife from New York, and the mask, and the poem, she made shortly before she died of cancer in 2008.  That is a remarkable story too...........so here are excerpts from the poem, and her mask, again.  Those things that move me, they remain embedded within my creative source, and they keep coming forward when the time is right.   I am always amazed at the treasures I've been given as blessings,  and questions,  when I look back.  


May each of us, in these crucial times, make strong Baskets with all our communities, our friends, our inner sanctuaries.  May we  Become strong Baskets.

Gather and Offer
by Ilana Stein

Gather towards the North
Gather towards the South
Gather towards the East
Gather Above, gather below
and gather the great Mystery

Gather what you’ve studied
Gather what you’ve learned
Gather how you’ve lived,
and gather what you’ve earned.
Gather what you’ve loved
Gather what you’ve lost.
Gather what you’ve soiled
and gather what it’s cost
Gather what you’ve wasted
and gather what you’ve saved

Gather who your friends are
and gather how they’ve cared
Gather your relations and  how you’ve fared
Then Gather birth and celebrate,
Gather death and cry
Gather hope, regret and longing and
gather up the why

Gather up the waiting, gather struggles,
Gather all the goals you’ve met and
gather up the bravery
Gather faceless fear and all the broken promises. Gather yesterday today,
and gather time tomorrow

Gather what you’ve ruined
and gather when you’ve failed.
Gather up the personal, gather up the frail
Gather up the culture, gather up the myths
Gather all the songs you’ve sung,
and all expressive art
Gather dances,  gather dreams,
and gather up your heart

Gather in the garden, 
Gather at the beach.
Gather on the mountain, 
Gather what’s in reach
Gather in the workplace, 
Gather on the roads
Gather in the home you’ve made
and gather all your kin
Gather your impatience, your frustration and your greed.
Gather up the words you’ve said,
Gather what you need.

Gather up your journey and all
 the time you’ve spent
Gather up your courage and walk inside your tent.
Gather up your secrets
and gather up your wisdom
Gather what you’ve forgotten
Gather what you’ve meant.

Gather faith and reverence
Gather truth and and gather lies
Gather secrets great and small -
Gather wisdom of the ages
and wrap them all  in your shawl
Gather sickness, gather health,
Gather tenderness and rage
Gather all your stories
Gather on the stage

Gather up your gatherings,
stir the basket’s bounty
Gather all remaining threads
and search across the county:

Then offer up your gatherings
to all nations and creations

Offer to your children and offer to your kin
Offer to the hungry, the needy and the grim
Offer to the blessed and offer to the prim
Offer to the kings and queens
Offer to the beggars and the paupers,
Offer to the jesters and 
Offer to the priestesses

Offer to the birds, chipmunks and the deer
Offer to the badger, mole, the frogs,
and o yes the bear
Offer to the green spring shoots,
the white and yellow crocus
Offer to the budding trees
the bushes and the rushes

Offer to the sand and mud,
the concrete and the buildings
Offer to the cook and maid
the seamstress and the butler
Offer to the farmers, offer to the farm
Offer to the doctors and offer for no harm

Offer to the visionaries,  offer to the artists
Offer to the frightened, offer to the scared
Offer to those endangered
 and to the unprepared
Offer to the hurting, offer to be healed,
Offer to your neighbor and offer to the field

Offer grace,  offer peace,  offer possibility
Offer privilege,  trust,  and faith
Offer gratitude, wonderment and awe
Offer loving kindness

Offer up your story
Offer honor and integrity
Offer for community
Offer your vulnerability

Offer what you’ve learned
Offer what you have
Offer what you know
Offer what you’ve shared
Offer both your ears,
your shoulders and your tears
Offer all you’ve gathered, 
offer all your cares.

You’ve gathered through the springtime,
the summer and the fall.

Now rest and build your strength up.
Cycle with the moon.
Cycle through the mystery time.
Close your eyes and sleep.

Dream the dreams of where you’ve been.
Dream of where you’re going –
Then gather.

(2008)

New Masks for Summer Workshops

Butterfly Dream/Pollinator Mask

I'm looking forward to the workshops I'm teaching at Brushwood and at Peters Valley, and to explore the Storytelling Segments of those workshops I made a few new masks that are, perhaps, more psychological than mythic.  I like them, and wait to see what stories they have to tell through the people who will be taking the workshops, what their voices are!

Fragmenting Mask

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