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making that cycles
making self portraits
Matryoshka dolls
moonly blood divination
stacking over time going in either direction
for one pearl going that way another thirty fold back into me
divinating creation through conscious devotion
already determined and already changing
contained and uncontained
giving and receiving
earth in drag
going and coming toward the same way
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The name ritual permutations came from visiting James Cunkle and Markus Jacquemains book, stone magic of the ancients. They were speaking of the stories of petroglyphs, and speculating that the majority were made in the various permutations of ritual.
Rituals.. involving pecking renderings of the community’s request into rock intended for their deity’s sympathetic blessing. A symbol of rain, a request for rain to come,
the animals intended to provide for the community; a successful hunt,
the pregnancy of a community member, going smoothly.
At a community level, gratitude ceremonies offered ritual petroglyphs symbolizing larger themes, spirit beings, and ancestors looking after the community..
I appreciate how art making can be utilized in utilitarian and reverent ways, as part of prayer, for the health of a community.
I’m thinking of my own spiritual practice, connecting with the spirit of plants, of creator, of sacred texts and people. How the process of my making is meant to be relational, a prayer. There is an intention within each permutation, each painting, requesting to be looked after, processed, and understood throughout the process and beyond completion and into decay.
A permutation is simply rearranging the order of materials to create a new sum. Changing the order, but not the parts.
Each piece in ritual permutations is made with the same parts, but carries a new prayer and study within.
Materials:
paper I made through a practice of honorably gathering local plants:
Pampas grass, Cortaderia selloana,
European beach grassAmmophila arenaria,
broad leaf cat tail, Typha latifolia,
cardoon, Cynara cardunculus,
recycled textile of cotton, Gossypium.
My own shed iron, cervical fluid, uterine lining, cyclical moon blood
The char from mugwort, Artemisia douglasiana, burned
a mix of handmade paints and inks made with multiple species honorably gathered and processed
Flower essences ..
Watercolor paint, and gouache
Collaged moon drawing prints
Photographs
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The origins of the materials that make my art are important to me. I care about the receipt of energy, harm, waste, and resources that build the pieces.
My body… giving me paint, blood every moon, is the closest I have come to full integrity, full embodied knowledge and responsibility, that make up my arts own body materiality.
I’m reminded of the sculptural art monster eva hesse.
in one moment, eva hesse said “life doesn’t last, art doesn’t last, it doesn’t matter.”
I like the phrase doesn’t last. making art, that folds back into the earth.
all we are is earth playing with itself shifting shape. doesn’t last. i think were all on some long rhythm together.
The first time I heard that quote from hesse it read apathetic to life. The counterargument, a quote from sol lewitt defends that hesse did care for her work to last.
Regardless, i’m not as concerned with what she meant. I’m reading it doesn’t matter. and matter seems to be coming alive, emerging and growing from its nounness to verbness and being both at once. matter-ing. i want to think of art as matter, and hold matter in aliveness in flux.
I want to let the sun in on this, i like making art that molds. that microbes eat, and that the water won’t feel polluted in.
I won’t lie, it sometimes hurts when my art grows old and begins to decay. what is that, the moving away from how i knew them? did i ever know them? weren’t they always changing all along anyway?
I want to move closer to decay, to ephemerality, to “deepen connection with the earth body” as che che luna says. This is a central inquiry of ritual permutations.