New Work

Returning 2009

I needed to do these pieces as "prayers" for my brother. They speak much better to me than words. I had all of these wonderful casts of hands, and also tiles I made that i imprinted words and letters into..........words, syllables, sentences are what we create the stories of our lives with......but before the words, are the feelings, the belonging, the response, the one who sees and experiences. Perhaps dying is shattering all those "vessels" of words and ideas and constructs (and terra cotta pottery shards imprinted with words seems like a good medium for that concept) that we have allowed to define who we are are. Perhaps, leaving all the words and vessels behind, at last, we fly.

"Form is empty, emptiness is form.
Likewise, sensation, discrimination,
conditioning, and awareness are empty.
In this way, Shariputra, all things are emptiness;
they are without defining characteristics;
they are not born, they do not cease"

THE HEART SUTRA

The Heart Sutra

Somewhere within the "hoop" of who we are, within the space between the child and the old man or woman, the beginning place and the ending place.........in the middle is the heart. I think that above all is where our "soul making" has gone on.

Holy Mother Take My Hand (2009)

I think this is my favorite. The Mother's Hand takes ours, and regardless of what artifice and awards and self-hate we have accumulated, as it dissolves in the greater being of Her compassion, we see that we are all just children. From that perspective, the place of the "rio grande", it is hard to conceive of not forgiving, and cherishing, everyone.

Prayers for the Dying: Reliquary

This Reliquary has two potent symbols of transformation and rebirth to me - a feather left behind from the flight of a Phoenix, and the skin of a snake, eternal symbol of natures death/birth cycle. In the end, I think that's what we leave behind........artifacts, cast off skins, and stories that are containers for the imaginations of those left behind. But like these symbols, the end is also illusive.

Dream Weaver 2009

Somehow this image is very important to me. We ourselves are the great work of art in progress, and we ourselves are all connected to the Web of being. These are Spider Woman's hands, the Dream Weaver, weaving a new dream in the silence, the dark, the depths of our innermost being.

Here are some verses from the Weaver Song performed every year at the Spiral Dance Ritual.

No one knows why we are born

A web is made, a web is torn

But love is the home that we come from

and at the core we all are one

Of life's Spring may we drink deep

and awake to dream and die to sleep

and dreaming weave another form

a shining thread of life reborn

Weaver, Weaver, weave our thread

whole and strong into your Web

Healer, Healer, heal our pain

in love may we return again

~~~Starhawk