Ecosmology, body, art
Dedicated to Sophie Strand whose being, body, and work has inspired and helped me profoundly since I connected with her work.
The art is the cultivation of an ecosmology that I seeded and sprouted after I died. Sought in the underworld, it is the body that the ancestors stitched in ritual song, long before I was born. It is the emergent body that the spirit beings and I offer back and forth, playful and often clumsy in our creative effort.
The ecosmology is the story I tell myself to survive, the story that makes me feel happy and whole. It is shaped by real electric encounters with myriad qualities of luminescent energy - lunar, solar, celestial. The mundane meditations of my daily craft are sculpted by the magnetic, mythic, gravitational dance of our games in orbit. Cyclical tides of tempestuous texture transition between the elemental states of matter with my mutable moods… When they ask ‘what’s the matter?’ I find I am unable to answer without laughing, or crying. The ecosmology, body, art of ‘who I am’ is all the shades and shapes I feel as I traverse time and space, this realm of matter. Matter - Mother. This realm of Mother, the spiral-force at the source of the mystery, this epic question known as ‘life’.
The art is the evolving conversation of this electro-magnetic flesh-bound ecosmology with all these other bubbling swamps of story. Every body is a Universe: impressionable moss-minds on a spectrum of metal and mycelium expel tactile tentacles, tentatively trying to make friends. Every story is true, because every body is real, complex and holy - full of holes (if there’s one thing I know about truth, it’s that it’s full of holes, and it evolves).
These stories have different shapes, magic systems, health conditions. What’s true in my ecosmology might not be what’s true in yours: our foreign contextual conditions may create friction, we may speak different languages. Depending on the weather or the aeon, you (or I) might feel like an iron fortress - impenetrable - and as frustrating as that may be, I try not to let it prickle or put me off. I’ll wind my way in eventually… I always do. Besides, anger’s sting only fortifies the metal armour that I’m melting with mild curiosity - what will happen when my tight frontiers ecstatically uncurl and exhale deeper than ever before?
I just love it when our ecosmologies intersect deliciously, our fronds of feeling and fascination flicker and flirt with one another’s. We fancy the smell of each other’s fragrant flowers. If the season smiles upon us, we cross-pollinate. Sometimes (though not as often as I’d like…) the scattered seeds of a conjunctive sporular eruption take root, and new pathways of dreaming begin to unfurl. Come, let us nurture the sproutlings - fresh water, sparkling sunlight, songs to fan the flame of their becoming. Perhaps their fruit will surprise us, if we tend the soil with love.