Children of the Celestial Tree, 2003

Mixed media

As I unravel, untangle, weave, sew, knit, knot, wrap and bind I am engaging in a process of unfolding the hidden mysteries of place and presence. This separation is necessary for me to gain an understanding of wholeness. I undo, pull apart, in an attempt to recognize the permeable boundaries between inside and outside, between what is contained and what is boundless. Stitching the materials into new shapes, I feel a oneness with the dynamic tension of this dualistic condition.

Images of my mother guiding my hands through a tiny loom are embedded in the warp and weft of my investigations. I use this fabric to create vessels out of which spill memories and realms that exist just beyond edges and shadows. These vessels become figures, trees, and mirrors. They are another world’s truth clothed in the ill-fitting garment of this world, this time. The figures are my constant companions, fragments of my self. They are wise teachers and confused kind-hearted monsters trying to understand the words whispered through the branches of that ancient Tree since time immemorial. They close their eyes to all that they know to try so see the truths that hide behind false perceptions. They open their hearts to reflect the light, so that the birds of the nest may sing melodies of the timeless hollow from which they came.

The rug, familiar, ordinary, evoking a sense of interior space, is transformed as it moves through a circular threshold. It becomes a landscape, a bizarre other world separated from the familiar only by an open portal, an eye, a navel, a mirror reflecting the close relationship of these two conditions. The presence of the Tree, the archetypal axis mundi that brings together the mysteries of earth and sky, lies in the folds of the rug. The figures grow out of the rooted landscape, casting shadows of the Tree in whose image they were created.