I have been making things for no reason other than I want them to exist. I have been trying to make the most beautiful things I can without regard to commerce or practicality, because something vital inside me needs to do this to go on. Above is my second crown made of copper. Formed with just a blade and my hands into something a little more tangible that an idea, but not quite a solid object of this dimension, either.
Above is the first one I made this year. It was not long after I came back up to the surface again after fighting a battle in the underworld that I’m at a loss to describe without allusions to greek myth. I knew I couldn’t go back to doing things the exact way I’d been doing before. I sure as hell couldn’t create for an algorithm anymore.
The nature of the experience I’d just been through, the nature of the world, melting down at an accelerated rate all around us, and the fact of my own suddenly startling age all stood around me like pillars. They are very tall. Their shadows curved to form an archway: nothing to do for it but walk through.
A decade past starting and running a once-thriving art-based business based on social media, a decade in which everything about that process changed into yet another way to pervert creative fire into capital for the oligarchs, I now just need to make things for their own sakes again. To feed the true flame, that mysterious whisper we are born with that tells us to sing, paint, sculpt, dance, write. My only creative goal at the moment is to find the true spark of unalloyed joy again, and coax it to grow. To do it for the right reasons. It’s the best psychic defense I know.
Under my ribs is a seed that contains all the hope of the universe, and all the knowledge of how to force life forward up through the soil of the world. Running up my spine is a candle wick. My heart is a pomegranate that spills garnets when I stick my thumbs into it. My skull is filled with a storm system, brilliant blue skies, and a cool, dark maze of caves.
What I learned this year: when it comes to protecting who and what I love, I am ready to fight past the limits of my own body. When it comes to creating something, I am ready to follow that labyrinth to see what lives in the center. I have come to the waterfall over the entrance to the cave. The only thing for it is to jump through the curtain of glittering light into the unknown world beyond.
Stunningly beautiful ! Such rich colours :-)