Archive: (Collection) Dali lithograph – Eight of swords; EJ letter to Iris Tree
Other: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; last page of P.Wollheben. Heart of the Forest book on empathy;
Location: Whitedown, Warren Hangar, Highdown
Dali lithograph of tarot displayed in the lower reception area of the main building of the college. Eight of Swords using imagery based on the painting of the penitent Mary Magdalene with blue and gold around the edges. In tarot, this card represents a test.
Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes of the ‘honourable harvest’. Peter Wollheben discusses empathy in The Heart of the Forest, that this is needed in order to make change; EJ talks of western inheritance and eastern influences – that the symbolism in the daub of holy water that brings peace is now lost and that animistic symbols in everything have an ego, that he is conscious of his own use of it.
In the story of the heron told by RWK Braiding Sweetgrass – about a fisherman who lives by a lake and learned from the heron how to catch the fish easily, it came with a warning to only take what he needs. He fed and with a full belly was so excited at how easy it was he fished for more, thinking he could store it for the future in his shed. Each day he took more and more until one day there were no more fish to catch. The heron flew past and he saw it look at him with dismay. He felt something was wrong and ran home to find all his store had been taken by the fox. The metaphor of nature knows best how to grow and store than we do, support nature to do its job is better, otherwise its like picking food meant for the next year, next generation, and watching what we have taken from that generation rot. Isn’t this like the waste piles of clothing, plastics? The relationship in the forest is a powerful symbol of balance, a place to learn.
I find metaphors and symbols powerful in how I see nature and internalise it; how I express this in my practice in drawing, painting, recording. The recent cut reveals a red-cloaked woman holding a staff, red riding hood.
The sky is deeply blue and full of energetic visibility – like wearing a new pair of glasses that intensifies the colour, edges, and brightness, makes it move. The ground is not level, the rolling humps like burial mounds to the left of the track and to the right. To one side the mounds are covered with white chalks meaning these have been turned recently. The chalks change colour over time from brilliant white to a dull pastel beige-green, a bit like the colour of the paint on the walls inside the college.
How might we interpret what we encounter in a painting, in nature?
How is empathy with nature, others, self, valuable.
How do we ‘use’ nature and artistic interpretations to further establish belief, reason, to create our world according to our expectations?
What about the ego and how does primordial guilt of becoming through taking, consuming, change our relationship to nature, each other, the world?
What is lost in this process, what balance becomes out of kilter that exacerbates the destruction of that which we depend on to thrive?
Relationship with that from which we nurture and take is like relationship with a parent, an authority, an idea of something other than us – idols and gods. The use of which separates, but in the senses (lose our mind and come to our senses Fritz Perl) idols are lost, there is no room for them. A smell of pine transforms that. How to turn from othering to brothering and sistering?
A podium for…just left lingering at the ridge overlooking the hangar below. A place to proclaim. So I do. What of the rituals imagined here? Or is just a place to rest the gun, orchestrate the beaters?
Further on, I find another pool of feathers – leftovers for the gods. In amongst them, this:
Peter Wohlleben says that trees are more correctly described as heads in the ground and feet in the air because their equivalent thinking structures are in their roots, branches grow in a way that gives balance.
My experience of life is of movement, of moving from one place to another, one country to another, one job to another, but perhaps, like tree, that is an illusion in that I am the same person experiencing all of this change. In the symbolic world, this makes more sense, being connected by what is hidden (beneath the ground like tree). In joining with nature, sensing and imagining, ‘other’ intelligence, ways of knowing, can be found beyond the surface values. In a drawing, you can pair it down to shapes and forms, or notice what it suggests to find facial features – eyes that look back at you.
Maybe the human-ness as in the pareidolia, is a way to invite curiosity, to look, to recognise, to care, to be looked at and cared for. (In psychology that babies look for facial features to recognise a parent)
