Final Notes to Myself on Original Mother

Original Mother

Final Notes to Myself:

June 24^th 2011

The flesh was meant to depict an exchange of soil into life and life back to the earth. Descending from the human to the mineral world and then a resurrection from terra firma to animate existence, the adaptation to environment: rising up from inorganic material to breath.

Original Mother was intended to help raise awareness of humanity by her visual narrative, reminding us to step outside of ourselves and view the larger picture.

If, as artist we are conceived as vessels, hollow conduits for the divine to flow through then certainly the journey of Original Mother carved me out to the zero emptiness of the Zen state. Ideas come from emotions beyond words, from our soulfulness.

Original Mother was intended to tell a story of resurrection celebration, sharing the elixir of belonging and the merging of two worlds.

She is a symbol of realization; behind the mask of conscious experience there is an abstract ancestor.  The mythology of Original Mother is psychological. She is pointing the way to our origins, to how we have all evolved from the same beginning. She is the initiator of our psyches, to realize how we fit together in the cord of humanity. When we accept all people as one family we are guided through life with more enrichment and realization. Our world is in need of unification symbols and icons, visualizations that unite people and heal our fractured communities.

Original Mother’s wings symbolize an effort to rise above ground and reach for higher ideals, a spiritual flight. They are flawed and scarred, yet one can tell by their battered textures that they have been used countless times, perhaps it is simply the metaphor of wings which are needed to represent or suggest that freedom is possible, that our lives can carry us upward and forward, but not without becoming twisted and blemished. Not without battles. As we all can learn from Original Mother there has to be a sacrifice for transformation. The two faces suggest we live in two worlds at the same time. One world of awakening and one of sleep. One world above ground and one below. We have our eyes open while conscious, our eyes closed when we enter our dream lives. Both are necessary. The faces represent the relationship between destruction and creation and death and rebirth. Original Mother wears a guttural texture. I was not trying to achieve a form of perfection with this sculpture as “perfection rapes the soul”.

The markings on Original Mother represent a corporeal energy, an unconscious instinctive force. I chose to bring attention to the spine of Original Mother because of the many myths and symbols, which are contained in this part of the anatomy.  Kundalini energy is described as being a sleeping, dormant potential force in the human organism. Accentuating this area of my sculpture was an attempt to suggest an awakening and uprising. Once again to come from the earth, to rise up and become conscious and with this the social responsibility to help one another, to place emphasis on the power of loving and healing.

The carved shapes on Original Mother have occurred in every era, culture, religion and esoteric sect. They are an abstract language recognized by all peoples. The diamond on the top of her head is clearly s symbol of clarity, ascension and wisdom. Diamonds are made from carbon, which is a foundational building block of matter. The diamond symbol is synonymous with refracting light. Original Mother is in the process of refracting her light to others. She has come from beneath with ancient wisdom to share with modern generations. Her feet are planted firmly in the mud of earth and at the top of her skull is the beacon of the invincible and the hope for our future. Love one another. May we all return to our roots, our homeland and take with us symbols of unification. May we weld back together that which has been fractured.

Original Mother Returns

…A page from my journal on Original Mother.
Today Original Mother returned to my studio cast in bronze and imbued with soul. My expectations for a unification symbol translated into a physical form. This year of my life is turning into tremendous energy and change. Perhaps the year 57 holds power and compassion in the cradle of somewhere between young and old. The chasing tools and pencils, the clay, the armatures, paper and poetry keep churning, sweet bird of change beneath a falling star. Original Mother has become this allegory in my life: fertility, birth, death and rebirth, the elements of life. My miraculous resurrection from the mundane to the glorious. Divine heroes buried beneath the temptation of reconciliation, the realization that there is no gift in settling. Original Mother has been a gift to myself on many levels all of which point to the primordial urge to remember where I came from and how I fit into the terrain of my own belief system. Original Mother has grounded me and at the same time provided me with a great wing span to soar and fall and not to fear flying too close to the brightness or the heat. Original Mother gave my sorrow when my Father died a platform, an energy field to open a dialogue with myself about life and death and the thread of a common background we all share. As sure as we are living and breathing we will die one day, our protective flesh will peel away and rot, our souls exposed to what we have believed will either rise up and move forward or become deafened by the anxiety of change and lie still. Either way we will have had our experience as humans. Something we all share, a common thread that will always unite us, what fractures us is falling away from remembering our true heritage. Original Mother is a reminder of all that we experience as humans, the commonalities we inhabit, the memory of roots that lead back to one idea, we are in this grid together, we are not separated just because certain belief systems rupture our vision of who we are as ‘one people’. We are HUMANS, the difference make up much less than the sum of our DNA. Original Mother is a reminder that we all return to the primordial womb of Earth. Original Mother is the ‘material prima’ churning in the alchemical process of regeneration. Pictures to be posted in the fall of OM. If you are interested in a private viewing contact Kimberly Nichols by e mail on the home page of this website.

Original Mother

For the last two years I have been working on a sculpture called Original Mother. I recently finisher her but will not be posting any pictures for a couple of months. If you are reading this and you are interested in seeing pictures please e mail me. This has been the most incredible journey of my life. Many thanks  to Carl for his undying enthusiasm for this project, his unstoppable problem solving and motivational pep talks. His love and support and his incredible suggestions and participation. Many thanks to Allen, Lisa, John and Alfonso for taking the ride with me and to my Dad who I know watches everything I do with compassion and love. Below is the narrative for Original Mother.

Art is respondent by emotion.

When I first conceptualized The Original Mother I was asking the all-inclusive question, “Where do we come from?” This has been one of the paramount questions asked by humans for thousands of years. Although the question itself provokes numerous levels of thought, my idea in asking was not to segregate orfracture my answer by seeking organized religion solutions, but to have a discusion with myself about The Original Mother, and by wondering who she was in a pre argument, pre organized religion realm.

I thought The Original Mother theme could be a solution to getting beyond racism and understanding that we all come from a common thread of ‘being human’. I contemplated how this could be an effective use of stimulating thought through this sculpture, a vision or path of reconciliation and healing, developing ideas of a culture grounded in consciousness of a mutual respect for life.

I also started to think about how people live in isolation, not feeling rooted to an ancestral homeland. I felt there could be a powerful message in a body of work representing a symbolic ‘Diaspora’ a migration or movement of a group of people away from an established homeland. Exile. To eventually accompany the Original Mother will be First Father and two children. The children will represent the fracturing of alliance as they leave their homeland only to return once they comprehend wholeness and belonging.

The first family will tell a story of Diaspora, a mythic exodus out of the garden into the wilderness and then home again. What welds the fracture back to wholeness and allows the children to come home again is the realization and understanding of our common ancestry.

The world is a diverse place this is part of the separation that we feel.  People come in different shapes and appearances, yet the genetic structure is not so different. Over 99% of the DNA in all people is identical. The remaining one percent is what accounts for our dissimilarity.

Somewhere down the line of history, we are all related. Our ancestors appear to blend into a single woman, who lived on the African savannah 150,000to 200,000 years ago. I like to imagine that the groupings of people that we refer to as races are all the same species, Homo sapiens.  We are the product of four billion years of evolutionary processes.  The Original Mother represents the oneness of human existence.  She is the mythic image of the feminine principal. Our human alcove emphasizes brains over brawn; this is what gives us creativity and language, art and poetry, curiosity and social interaction. The Original Mother is a cellular memory, which I think we all have. She is a symbol of healing and unifying, the unification of mind, matter, soul and body, thinking and feeling intellect and intuition, reason and instinct. The Original Mother becomes a valid expression of the sanctity and unity of life. Not as a personalized image but a universal emblem a vision of life as a sacred whole in which all humanity is represented.

As an artist I am aware of the urgent need to comprehend the world as a unity. I have conceptualized The Original Mother to be the primal source of all humans. Mythic images are important on so many levels. Symbols and icons radically influence us both in our personal and in our collective life. If concurrent forces shape the cultivation of human culture than feral anthropology is scripted in ancient symbols all over The Original Mother. She is the aperture of human evolution.

We are all trying to find our place, to find justification for our experiences and to explain our brief stay upon the earth. To observe the Original Mother is to expose all of our inner questioning and to be open to a direct, visual dialogue with our ancient cellular memory.

While nicknaming The Original Mother ‘OM ‘I realized that her abbreviated name is the most important and significant word of Mantra tradition. It is considered as the root Mantra.

OM is the most often chanted sound among all the sacred sounds on earth. OM is said to be the original primordial creative sound from which the entire universe have manifested.

Om is the sound, which is not the result of the striking of two objects. It emanates on its own. It is the primal sound of the universe that contains all sounds in it.

Once again unity is the theme.

For as long as people have existed we have struggled to know where we come from, to discover and define a universal truth. It is a personal journey with landmarks along the way. The journey is almost always plagued with hardships and also filled with an ineffable joy. But we are all in the grid together; despite our differences we do all share a common ancestry. Within this human tapestry I offer The Original Mother, a sculpture of unification.

Gesso Cocteau 2011