Concentric Story, Greece

Travel Memoir

5 minutes read

Athens is a rad mad anarchic place. A feeling underfoot of rumbling and rupturing.

Things I have seen:

1)  Groups of old Greek men. Being old Greek men together. 

Clustered in parks and doorways. Playing board games in the market. Always seem to be debating some important debate.

2) Graffiti, tagging, spray paint, street art. On everything.

3) Tavernas with multitudes of chairs exploding onto frantic and pockmarked streets.


3) A beautiful Syrian boy with a smile I had seen before. He wanted to talk to me about tattoos and family. And liberation. And his journey over the Mediterranean from Turkey. And what the dance of his people looked like. He wanted to come with me as I drifted around Athens, gathering image and story.


4) Art in Documenta 14, some interesting, some forgettable. Have forgotten it already. 


5) Beau Dick's final offering.


6) An old man on the train flicking his worry beads over and over, surrounded by youths with eyes glued to phone screens.

7) Refugees


8) Kurdish people dancing for freedom of speech and culture.


9) Herds of cats


10) A Greek priest marching past with billowing black robes.

11) The shape of mouths when they have Greek words inside them.

12) Colour(s) of Mediterranean skin

13) Archeological sites everywhere


14) Orange trees. Everywhere.


15) The genderfluid krumptwerk and hair flick of a Brazilian human at a party on a verandah on a hot night.

16) 3 Greek Orthodox priests on the packed and sweaty train in robes and black fezzes. One had a mean face. Maybe there is waywardness in his flock (of thoughts)

17) The dampdamaged walls of the building in which dissidents of the regime of dictatorship were incarcerated.


Things I have heard:


1) A woman weeping with her head against a golden icon in a dark tiny Byzantium church.


2) The humming of the ancient two-toothed woman outside the church wearing a head scarf and Justin Bieber t-shirt.


3) The stories of people displaced from their land and people.


4) The transformation of thought and consciousness as language interpreted from Arabic to English to French to Greek.


5) Clicking of worry beads.


6) Greek music.

7) The wet sound of two teenagers kissing next to me on the metro.

8) The word 'kin' as a screenshot in my mind when I walked past the woman whose bright eyes jumped into mine. 


9) The chantsong of people in a baptism ceremony for a baby. That I was somehow a part of .


Things I have smelt:


1) Orange blossom


2) Jasmine, rosemary, lemon, kumquat, fig leaf


3) Stale metro air


4) Dog shit


5) The heady sweet incense in a church completely mosaic-ed and painted with gold iconography, upon whose shore I washed up. Where I saw women wildly crossing themselves over and over. 


A thought:
God must hear a lot of beseech in her line of work.

Concentric Story, South Africa 2023

Travel Memoir

6 minutes read

A pink tinged dawn here at the sacrum of the crystalline spine.

The spirits of the land are being called into the day by the songbird sky. I am, in part, made of dove song. Also, of falling water and slow-moving mountains.

And the filamentous ribbons of dream.

And the bottomlessness of lakes.

We, my twin, and I, arrived at night to the barnacle stone cottage on the edge of the verdant canyon. The pock marked road taking us to that point (point that is a coalescence of time, place, land, intention, interiority) was red. Of course.

Always I am shaped by the Red Road, by walking it with awareness, by the falling away from it, by locating it within. Also, by the delicacy of the negotiation I have with being on a road created by the footsteps of someone else’s ancestors.

There are beautiful and shimmering borders within which culture spins on axis, remembering and forgetting. Like the walls of cells, the edges can be porous. The traverse can be truthful and integral to the potential coherency of the whole moving portrait. It can also be trespass.

The Cloud of Forgetting gathers more and more into itself though, and the humans don’t remember how we have always fed the gods. The rituals are different, the gods are different, the food is different, the songs are different. But the vibratory frequencies are the same as they always were.

Same as they ever were.

Faint now.

When my spine is open to the sky and the earth, I can still hear the murmuring that always was, never was not. The vibrating sound that births the worlds day after day, night after night, breath after breath. Most often the symphony has missing parts and imperceptible frequencies.

The gods are almost forgotten.

I am reminded of a story my brother told me about how Pan was forgotten by the people of Greece and how he showed up in Morocco as Bou Jeloud.

Once he, my brotherfriend, arrived in a remote village in the northern mountains and encountered a ritualistic festival where he was stopped by people in a trance like state. One of them was dressed as a half man, half goat, draped in a freshy bleeding goatskin and brandishing a phallic beater. He chases and swats the girls with his phallus, imbuing them with fertility every spring. This ritual remembers through ancient songs and embodied dance, the good fortune Pan bestowed on the mountain folk.

The people, he told me, drop from their trance momentarily to ask him for money or sweets.

Next to the cottage and in the first light of the turning day is a tree with shiny green berries. It is filled with the catlike feasting of green Knysna loerie birds. They hiss at one another and flop about the tree. Their swoops away are scarlet flashes. Around their voluminous and crested movements fly emerald headed sugar birds. One of them keeps fighting his reflection in the cottage window.

We climbed up the writhing gully in the folded land feeling the shapes of stories inside.

When I am home on this land there is an awareness at the bottom of my feet, a downward- moving-noticing, of what moves just below the surface. Last time it was huge whales, drifting slowly beneath me. When I arrived this time, I had the experience underfoot of the way water on sand feels when standing on the edge of the sea and the wave is drawing itself back.

The ocean mother calling in her child.

And then this day in the furrowed gold-green hills I am tugged under by a deep and ancient fracture. The wound in me is an opening into the wound in this land. It is all I can do to navigate with my heart and mind and breath to skirt this opening, faltering at the very rim, to keep a toehold on beauty and hope. I must keep my eyes on the shimmer of the afternoon poplar leaves, the light on the distant ocean, the fractal sky.

I remember a faltering when I emerged from my mother’s body. I remember she needed to keep me inside her longer as the rioting ensued around her/our birthing ritual. There is still a patterning in me that this start-stop created; the passage from one place to another is texturally lacy and complex. There are thorns in this space-time maneuvering.

I am a moth, powdery and watchful, swooping the night from thorn to thorn.

The regal Hammerhead bird in the green-trunked fever tree watches the doorway just above the crown of my head. Her dreaming marks the threshold through which the newly-formless ones are moving. Her call is the cartographic intersection that connects the worlds.

I have noticed her noticing me.

I came here looking for reflection on the one I have seen behind me and the one in front. The little boy in the ancestral realm, both times in black and white monochrome, and the little girl in the descendant realm coming towards me from the future. I am reminded that I am the doorway.

The talismans onto which I have blown fall about into constellations of praise poems that tell me not to follow the one-eyed shepherd with his one-eyed sheep. One of them is a small age-dark ivory dice that flies to the edge of the smoky room. It lands with 2 dots facing up.

I read this as an affirmation of the 2 spirits, in 2 directions, both seen twice.

I am a moth, powdery and watchful.

Concentric Story, Japan 2019

Travel Memoir

4 minutes read

5am, just me and the birdsymphony.

The coolest time of the day, this is, the time to drink one’s fill and enter the approaching day and her magnanimous heat as a deep and cool lake.

Begin with a lake in each eye. My mother said.

Leaving Tokyo few days ago from Shinjuku, the craziest (and I have seen crazy) train station, to arrive in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, we were picked up by the Biennale bus to weave up and up the mountains on narrow winding roads.

The bus was filled with artists, from Japan, Taiwan, Russia, Israel, France, Bulgaria who have been working in many venues scattered through the green hills. I was reminded of the time one year ago that I found myself on a similar bus heading into the hinterlands of Mongolia. That one in the charge of Open Mind Woman who swayed around the bus pouring morning vodka shots for all.

The galloping and verdant mountains here in Gunma are from a Henrik Drescher painting, steep and green. The plants are climbing all over each other like children. Bamboo forests and Japanese cypress and pine and more I haven’t had the honour to meet. Yet.

The air is still and wet and hot and filled with the scent of the waxy white Easter lilies that are everywhere.

Unbuckling my shielded spirit from flights and city, inside I am a soaring thing.

We are taken to Kuni, one of the most beautiful villages in Japan. It perches on the side of a mountain like a barnacle, a jewel. Tiny walking streets and old houses, flowers everywhere and the sound of the river that runs beneath it.

It brought me back to a similar and very different place on Samothrace, the Greek island of mystics. That small stone village that creeps and climbs up the hillside that I explored with my twinbrother a couple years back.

Artists have made installations in spaces throughout this village that is famed for its silkworm farming. We flow from one to the next like melting wax, hearing from them of their work and process. One in an old silkworm factory (I use that word breezily, it is a small darkwood, paperdoored room). Her work up in the rafters; fabrics and kimonos and disappearing dyes.

One in a tiny wooden house, suspended and balanced objects and buttons on wires. For those who know my work, you will know my flood of delight on seeing those buttonfriends.

Some artists in an ancient mud/straw house, the Yumoto Residence The interior is dark with wood and illuminated by dusty shafts of silver light. Takano Choei, a prominent scholar of Western medicine in the 1800’s was hidden here as a fugitive from prison, where he was held for criticizing the ruling regime.

One installation is a ninja house with secret doors and rearranged space.

The beautiful creation by the beautiful Mariko that included projection on the low roof, rocks suspended over her grandmother’s stoneware bowls and a video piece on an iphone inside a just-cracked cupboard. She collected dust from this house and also from the house of the hiding doctor’s teacher in Holland, through which she shone the video. An artist who can create awareness of the consciousness of particle.

One artist with the spirit of a blue heron created a piece inside a dark mud shed. Dripping blue stuff from the ceiling, the material harvested from glow sticks.

And one who made a huge mud pot in the wet wooded mountain, as homage to her grandmother.

Halka residency and Concentric Stories, Istanbul

Travel Memoir

6 minutes read

Raining morning in Istanbul. Constantinople. The soundtrack from my balcony is a collaboration of the voice of the Muezzin calling us to prayer, the cars wetly streaming by, the jazz coming from the apartment next door and the rain dropping from a liquid sky. My arrival here to this storied astounding city was small and vulnerable, me sailing away on a pinprick evening, leaving my twin on the island. Him so tiny.

I sat in limbo in a limbo town until 2am, shrinking and growing smaller by the state of boredom and waiting and loneliness. Arriving at dawn, disoriented, delirious in the hugest bus depot in the world, buses streaming in from all over Europe, the Balkans, Russia etc. People, confusion, sound.

I pulled myself really close towards myself to navigate the underworld of the Istanbul metro system to find myself. Where I am.

In the sweetest reality.

Myself and a 72-year-old artist in an old house of wooden floors and winding staircase. My studio apartment is on the top floor, with 2 balconies.

Meeting Slobodan, a former dissident from a former Yugoslavia, pulled me back into focus. Within minutes, we agreed there was nothing random about our meeting. Him, a shimmer of a man, theatre/installation maker, philosopher, curator, costume maker, Artship founder, contemporary of Marina Abromovitch (he told me stories of her at 14, her family).

He has become superimposed with the character of the uncle, the caretaker of the netsuke collection, in the book I am reading called “Hare with the Amber Eyes”. Of course, in my exploration of Kadikoy, of the pokey antique stores, funky vintage stores, and coffee shops, the first thing I find is a tiny netsuke elephant.

Slobodan has the hand movements of a woman, precise, delicate; his eyes are bottomless lakes. He walks with 2 curled canes and leaves miniature drawings made in the night from mulberry and cherry juice, tea and coffee, drying around the kitchen. We spent the evening with a heart surgeon-Sufi-musician who practices the ancient tradition of playing Sufi music to patients as part of their healing process. He has brought people back from thresholds with his flute.

We sat in the tiny hot timeless studio of Slobodan, white curtains fluttering, as this brilliant surgeon played us ancient Sufi songs. The old man humming. And then answering with Bosnian revolutionary songs.

In the gathering dusk of Muezzin voice.

And we talked about notes and tradition and the sacred and quantum biology and the mathematicians who came before Einstein. And the breath.

And his playing a miracle child back from a long coma. And his reconnection with that child, 20 years later.

Drifting, here, involves more awareness and courage than anywhere I have been. In a yesterday drift, I came to the edge of the Bospherus. I was met by a black cat who curled onto my lap, as I sat and watched the business of this waterway that joins the Black Sea to the Mediterranean (by way of the Seas of Marmara and the Dardanelles), the multitudes of people promenading, the lovers taking selfies, the Hagia Sofia just over the glittering water. Old men selling cigarettes, older women selling packets of tissues, people calling out their wares, food being cooked and sold, people walking with trays of mussels and lemon, and green fruit. People playing games: throw rings onto an arrangement of 4 Marlboro packs, shoot a fluttering balloon with a BB gun, something that involved 2 tiny bunnies in a box and a tray of different coloured folded up paper(?). Card tricks, checker games, nubile boy-men on rollerblades with bleached hair and dark eyes.

The clash and mélange and stew and perfume of cultures. The remembering, in me, that when we align ourselves with our work, nothing is separate. Even the feeling of loneliness and limbo, is vital.

As is the feeling of arriving at yourself.

My creative investigation at Halka residency actually began in Athens some weeks prior where I participated in the making of a performance installation called Sanctuary. This work, directed by South Africa’s Brett Bailey, cast refugees from Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Palestine, Bangladesh, Eritrea as performers in installation vignettes. I watched as the direction, delivered in English, was translated from language to language to language.

And when we laughed, it was in the same language.

I began a drawing practice there that I call WordMaps.

This is the idea of taking words from different languages and metaphorically putting them in a small drawstring bag, shaking it and then throwing the jumbled letters down onto paper. The mixture of words forms a pattern, a neologistic symbol-shape.

This idea continued and expanded in Istanbul where I began a process I call Word Trades. This was a social project wherein I traded words for art with various and diverse people I met in the city. I would ask for a particular word in their language- mostly Arabic or Turkish- and would trade them a drawing or object I made. I would include these in my WordMap designs, which I then painted onto antique maps.

One such intersection was at a wee café of writers that I would visit with Slobodan for morning coffee. I sat with the kind-eyed barista, also a writer, and we traded words while I drew him images. I asked him for the words; family and land, belonging and longing. When I asked him for the word: rupture, he struggled to find the Turkish word. I explained ideas of cleaving and tearing and volcano. He turned to someone writing nearby and asked him, who turned to the next person. Eventually everyone in the café was discussing the meaning of rupture and giving me words. It was a most human exchange between people for whom words are material. I am not sure who else picked up on the irony of how we were all woven together by a word whose meaning is to fracture and crack.

Word Trades was a way to engage creatively with other humans and really, this, more than the drawings, was the residency project. It included my practice called Drifting, which is a way of deliberately allowing myself to be both lost and also found. I metaphorically pull up anchor and move out into the city with no destination or agenda, just following the signs and symbols and my intuition. This is essentially a walking meditation. When one can be in this state of flow and curiosity and awareness, the synchronicities and stories can be profound. In addition to the beauty of presence and meeting other humans, I would write in public spaces. This writing practice, called Concentric Stories, moves inwards and outwards. It records and reflects what my senses perceive around me, and tracks what is triggered in my memory, childhood and dreams.

Story writing and a way to intentionally sew myself into the fabric of the particular time and space that I inhabited.

Concentric Story, Lisbon

Travel Memoir

7 minutes read

Woke up at dawn with the bird nations here in Lisboa.

Heardfelt them like they were muezzins calling their people to the day. I like thinking about how they coexist, in the dovecotes and lemon trees. How the nuthatches join the herd of chickadees. How the different songs of the songbirds are a choir at first light.

Even now coming through my big window in my studio at the top of the hill.

I look out over the red roofs of the Alfama district down to the Tejo River.

After my arrival yesterday, I went out into the city in that delicious state of no-sleep delirium, allowing myself to be swept around like a thing in the current. Or the wind.

I like to pull up anchor like this. Gathering stories. And images. And converging with other drifting realities.

A glimpse of an art book I made in Lisbon

Here’s one (small story): I was climbing steep stairs up a narrow alley. Three women were standing in a doorway. They stopped me to tell me they liked how I look, kept touching me and laughing and saying they liked me. We spoke in that language between languages, some words of English and Portuguese, and shared our beautiful origins. One woman was from Angola, grew up in Mozambique. One from Cape Verde grew up in Brazil. The one in the shadowy doorway with the shy and peeping boy in her arms, pregnant belly, covered head was from Bangladesh. And me from Kenya, grew up in Cape Town, living in the mountains of Sinixt territory.

Afternoon and dappled sun, laundry fluttering above us, and four women like ships.

We all laugh in the same language.

And a black cat.

Things I have seen this week:

1) After sneaking through a decrepit door in a decaying wall to an old water tower, I came across the happening of 2 old men in suits picking loquats from a laden and forgotten tree. Orange sticky juice on their lips and chins.

2) The anachronism called a phone (tikki) box. Twice.

3) The land called the Algarve from the window of a train heading south. Fig and olive and pine and eucalyptus and groves of orange trees. And vineyards. Of course.

3) Small rural villages from said train. Whitewashed walls with blue and ochre trim in the afternoon light.

4) The Atlantic at the south of Portugal.

5) The site of the oldest slave market in Europe.

6) Witnessing the pomp and ceremony of a small town’s celebration of the revolution. On the site of the oldest slavery market in Europe. Young and nubile girls in folk costume. Scratchy song broadcast through the square. Wind off the ocean whipping hair and eyelash.

7) The hands at the end of a brilliant mind whose talk I attended. Hands like small brown wrens fluttering around his neat and precise and intellectually vast okinisphere. Hands that helped punctuate and connect the threads of neologistic, literary, philosophical, art-thought (that spanned ideas from Joyce to space to object to apartheid to Durban to decolonization to consciousness to the attempt to find meaning in the luminal space between knowing and the knowing of the knowing)

8) A one-armed breakdancer. Killing it!

9) A ceremony for the ancestors.

10) The sweet small old man crushed with me in the tram. Us below everyone like we were children in a swaying forest. He loved my bag, and I loved his old fisherman hat. His eyes were mountain pools.

11) Boca de Inferno where Alistair Crowley faked his suicide. With the help of the Portuguese poet Fernando Passoa.

Things I have heard:

1) The waitress humming “99 Red Balloons”. Which stuck in my head for the day. In German.

2) The most beautiful Cape Verde guitar player.

3) A flushed face large Fado singing woman.

4) A small and petit Fado singing woman.

5) A mother and child singing on the side of the road.

6) The birds in the Algarve. Doing birdsong like a deepfeeling woman does Fado.

7) The mate-coo of doves outside my window at the crepuscular times of the day.

8) The smiling man who whispered ”fly” as I passed.

Things I have smelt:

1) The Wind off the Atlantic.

2) Bacalhau fish cakes.

3) The dank and brown smell of the Rio Tejo.

4) The headcrownhair of my 2 friends in the attempt to describe in words the smells of each other. I was rosemary. My friends were cumin-paprika and a subterranean river.

5) Honeysuckle.

Concentric Story, Barcelona

Travel Memoir

3 minutes read

A strange and drifting melancholy has been about me. Until it lifted while I slept last night.

It was a fluttering thing.

A thing in a minor key.

A thing at the edges that pulled me towards itself.

The cure, it would appear, was the pianist and his beautiful hands. Not on me. On the old piano in the Smallest Theatre in the World, El Teatre més Petits del Món, on the Encarnació street.

A tiny stone theatre for an intimate concerto.

I sat curled like a cat in the corner, my hair wet from the rain, and invited the music to wash through me.

He spoke about his work with flourish and in Catalan.

His hands, birds. The words. Also birds.

The songs I had never heard before.

So I invited them into the stream that tugged me under.

And he played, his body swaying like eel grass in a current. Towards the end is where the curative power was for me. He asked the people to call out three notes. With this small bundle of notes, he unraveled an improvisation. It spiraled through him; his eyes closed. His sight had moved to the end of his fingers.

When he stood and bowed, he showed us the small beginnings of baldness and it struck me as deeply intimate. To show yourself like that. To come out of hiding, even.

It reminded me of the time I was on a night flight from somewhere to elsewhere and when walking down the dim sleeping passage I met a fallen and vulnerable toupee. Just lying there, like a small animal.

The man who belonged to this was asleep, his shiny head flopped over. What to do in such a situation?

Try and put it back on his head? Or in his lap? Or carefully step around it?

This, to me, was a deeply personal and strange encounter. 

We all have our hiding strategies.

Sometimes they slip.

Concentric Story, Sinixt territory some years back

Travel Memoir

6 minutes read

Once an old man wrote me a letter.

In it were the words ‘There is no turning back now”

Of course, I don't know what was in his mind when writing that, but they landed at my feet, those words, like a call to something larger than myself.

They reminded me of how my son looked at me once during a ceremony in the middle of one night, and said, ‘just commit’. 

I am drawn to those ones that have the courage to fly at life.

I found myself in a very small and intimate vigil yesterday. We were in the hot springs and the air and sky, and trees were filled with the songs of birds. Maybe they had just returned in herds to herald Winter's-end, or maybe their songs had just shifted gears for the spring. It was as if the trees themselves were shimmering and composed of song. Lying in the hot spring under the bright sky, I felt the jubilance of potential and fortitude and newness at having passed through the passage of winter to arrive at this place of songs. I read something somewhere about only arriving at the light of dawn by passing through the night….

Looking up I saw a small yellow bird fall haphazardly to the ground. 

And then attempt takeoff. 

Watching her spiraled flight skyward felt like I was looking up through water as she swam to the surface. Or I was looking backwards through binoculars; felt for a moment like I was in an old scratchy Danish movie.

Again, she dropped from the sky and landed in a stunned and small heap. That little bird shook and struggled to stretch her wings, to take a step, to connect with her life force. 

She began her journey back to the Universe slowly as I sat and waited with her. The soundtrack playing from the speakers went from a song about the wide wide ocean (sounded like Iron and Wine) to one crooning ‘you are not alone’ to a sweeping classical piece that, when woven with the ongoing birdsong and the inhale-exhale sounds of the pool filter, became a requiem. 

A large requiem for a small life.

We put snow around her and dripped water on her beak and she drank with such an accepting grace as to remind me that the life that was departing her is the same as that which animates me. 

And you.

During her slow and quiet odyssey, a little grey feather came tumbling from the sky and landed right next to her. Every now and then it fluttered up and floated back down, circling her ritualistically. It seemed to me like it was sent from her people to fan her off during her ceremony.

This reminded me of the time I was on an island in the middle of the Chilco Lake. The water there is milky and turquoise from the melt of thousands of glaciers that join the sky to the lake. That joins the ancient to the now. 

I was there fasting for four days and four nights, beginning on my 33rd birthday. On the fourth day, I was sitting watching the water and the sky and the universe and myself and everything, when an eagle flew overhead. As it flew near the island, it dropped two white plume feathers a way off the shore. I knew that those were meant for me to take care my two children. I watched and waited all day for those two gifts to come to me. They floated and rode with the currents and wind, two perfect white plumes on the turquoise water surface. One arrived some hours after dispatch, drifting right to where I sat. The other came into harbour when the light was already shifting. 

It too washed up at my feet.

Astounding to notice how elastic time really is. And how different it is when we inhabit ourselves slowly and without tilting forwards or backwards. 

And when we place our slowerselves in the natural world(s).

Speaking of lakes and fallingbirds, I had a strong dream last week in which I was walking along a vast and windswept lakeshore. I was watching an eagle circle and glide in the grey sky. Ahead of me were two white swans right at the edge of the lake. Suddenly the eagle plummeted from the sky and grabbed one of the swans. It flew up with its heavy captive holding it in outstretched human arms.

That swan struggled and fought and managed to break the grasp of the humaneagle and get on its back for a moment before slipping off and plunging towards earth. 

She fell from a great height and crashed through the roof of a small wooden house on the shore. Suddenly I was standing by the bed into which she fell, and she was a woman, the wife of a very old friend. He was the other swan and was wailing and weeping, refusing to look at his broken mate. She, however, just lay there like Frida Kahlo, sleeping neatly and unbroken under the quilts. Eventually she opened her eyes and looked around slowly as though she had seen forever.

It feels to me that that swanwoman was magnetized to that homeplace, to her bed. Although our hearths are at the hearts of our homes, the place we lay down safely to dream each night is what makes home. The integration of each day during sleep is as important as the events of the day. 

Like the exhale after the inhale.

Savasana.

Concentric Story, South Africa 2023

Travel Memoir

5 minutes read

A pink tinged dawn here at the sacrum of the crystalline spine.

The spirits of the land are being called into the day by the songbird sky. I am, in part, made of dove song. Also, of falling water and slow-moving mountains.

And the filamentous ribbons of dream.

And the bottomlessness of lakes.

We, my twin, and I, arrived at night to the barnacle stone cottage on the edge of the verdant canyon. The pock marked road taking us to that point (point that is a coalescence of time, place, land, intention, interiority) was red. Of course.

Always I am shaped by the Red Road, by walking it with awareness, by the falling away from it, by locating it within. Also, by the delicacy of the negotiation I have with being on a road created by the footsteps of someone else’s ancestors.

There are beautiful and shimmering borders within which culture spins on axis, remembering and forgetting. Like the walls of cells, the edges can be porous. The traverse can be truthful and integral to the potential coherency of the whole moving portrait. It can also be trespass.

The Cloud of Forgetting gathers more and more into itself though, and the humans don’t remember how we have always fed the gods. The rituals are different, the gods are different, the food is different, the songs are different. But the vibratory frequencies are the same as they always were.

Same as they ever were.

Faint now.

When my spine is open to the sky and the earth, I can still hear the murmuring that always was, never was not. The vibrating sound that births the worlds day after day, night after night, breath after breath. Most often the symphony has missing parts and imperceptible frequencies. The gods are almost forgotten.

I am reminded of a story my brother told me about how Pan was forgotten by the people of Greece and how he showed up in Morocco as Bou Jeloud.

Once he, my brotherfriend, arrived in a remote village in the northern mountains and encountered a ritualistic festival where he was stopped by people in a trance like state. One of them was dressed as a half man, half goat, draped in a freshy bleeding goatskin and brandishing a phallic beater. He chases and swats the girls with his phallus, imbuing them with fertility every spring. This ritual remembers through ancient songs and embodied dance, the good fortune Pan bestowed on the mountain folk.

The people, he told me, drop from their trance momentarily to ask him for money or sweets.

Next to the cottage and in the first light of the turning day is a tree with shiny green berries. It is filled with the catlike feasting of green Knysna loerie birds. They hiss at one another and flop about the tree. Their swoops away are scarlet flashes. Around their voluminous and crested movements fly emerald headed sugar birds. One of them keeps fighting his reflection in the cottage window.

We climbed up the writhing gully in the folded land feeling the shapes of stories inside.

When I am home on this land there is an awareness at the bottom of my feet, a downward-moving-noticing, of what moves just below the surface. Last time it was huge whales, drifting slowly beneath me. When I arrived this time, I had the experience underfoot of the way water on sand feels when standing on the edge of the sea and the wave is drawing itself back. The ocean mother calling in her child.

And then this day in the furrowed gold-green hills I am tugged under by a deep and ancient fracture. The wound in me is an opening into the wound in this land. It is all I can do to navigate with my heart and mind and breath to skirt this opening, faltering at the very rim, to keep a toehold on beauty and hope. I must keep my eyes on the shimmer of the afternoon poplar leaves, the light on the distant ocean, the fractal sky.

I remember a faltering when I emerged from my mother’s body. I remember she needed to keep me inside her longer as the rioting ensued around her/our birthing ritual. There is still a patterning in me that this start-stop created; the passage from one place to another is texturally lacy and complex. There are thorns in this space-time maneuvering.

I am a moth, powdery and watchful, swooping the night from thorn to thorn.

The regal Hammerhead bird in the green-trunked fever tree watches the doorway just above the crown of my head. Her dreaming marks the threshold through which the newly-formless ones are moving. Her call is the cartographic intersection that connects the worlds.

I have noticed her noticing me.

I came here looking for reflection on the one I have seen behind me and the one in front. The little boy in the ancestral realm, both times in black and white monochrome, and the little girl in the descendant realm coming towards me from the future. I am reminded that I am the doorway.

The talismans onto which I have blown fall about into constellations of praise poems that tell me not to follow the one-eyed shepherd with his one-eyed sheep. One of them is a small age-dark ivory dice that flies to the edge of the smoky room. It lands with 2 dots facing up.

I read this as an affirmation of the 2 spirits, in 2 directions, both seen twice.

I am a moth, powdery and watchful.

Concentric Story, Mongolia Land Art Biennale (2018)

Travel Memoir

3 minutes read

There were 28 international and Mongolian artists invited. We lived in gers on the land in Murun Sum, Khentii Aimag near the border with Tuva.

During the days, we would go out onto the land and make art installations and in the evening come together to eat and be together. And drink vodka and fermented mares milk called airag.

Late one night I was doing just that with my Mongolian friends, laughing together in the language we could all speak, when we saw carlights. On the steppes one can see cars approaching from weeks away.

Like ships at sea.

Eventually and a few vodkas later the car arrived at our camp and delivered a small Japanese man.

He was a sculpture student from Kyoto, had heard about the Biennale, had flown to Ulaanbaatar and had found someone going to this remote location.

He sat awhile with us, blinking shyly, like a small and dark cat.

I remember the sky that night, each night, stuffed full of stars and planets and birthing nebula and who knows how many flying objects and interplanetary nations against the ink and velvet of space.

The next evening, I was walking over the hills with a few visual artist friends to see their art installations when he ran up and asked to join us. He looked like Frodo Baggins, petit and girlish in his movements.

We climbed together and examined 3 or 4 art installations in selected spots in the hills and rocks. At the top we watched incredulously as the sunset shimmered and the light animated the green and gold steppes and mountains as far as the eye could even imagine.

Every colour of all the awe in the universe filled the sky.

We were talking about how seeing that much green and beauty could heal our eyes.

I then shared the yogic healing technique with them of rubbing the palms of our hands together vigorously to activate electromagnetic energy and cupping them over our open eyes. We did this together, four new friends on a green mountaintop somewhere in Mongolia. After a while we slowly took our hands away, but the small Japanese sculptor kept his there. For a long time.

When he finally removed his hands there were rivers spilling from his eyes and running down his sweet face.

With his limited English he kept saying he didn’t know, he didn’t know. I am not sure if that meant he didn’t know why he was crying. Or that he didn’t know how beautiful and tragic the world really was.

Intimacy with strangers is a deep and exquisite thing.

It is an opportunity in a fleeting moment to rush at fearlessness together.

Top 5 Reasons Why Visual Art Is Important in Modern Society

June 3, 2024 | By Gracia Audrey

8 minutes read

Visual art, in its many forms, plays a crucial role in our lives and society. Beyond being aesthetically pleasing, it holds a deeper significance that enriches our experiences and shapes our perspectives. Let's explore how Tanya's work exemplifies the importance of visual art in modern society.

1. A Language of Emotion

Lines in Blood and Milk (2009-10)

Tanya’s art acts as a silent storyteller, speaking directly to our hearts in the complexities of modern life. Her creative process, informed by ancient wisdom teachings and the maverick curiosity of her spirit, expands into liminal realms, reporting back on the fractal nature of reality. Through her visual and symbolic language, Tanya conveys emotions and ideas that resonate universally. Each piece of her artwork evokes a sense of serenity, awe, and deep contemplation, inviting viewers to connect on a deeper level beyond words.

2. Promoting Dialogue and Reflection

Tanya’s work stimulates meaningful dialogue and introspection in our contemporary world. Her pieces touch on metaphysical truths that provoke thought-provoking questions and discussions about our place in the Cosmos and the relationship between the self and the greater universe. By addressing these profound topics through her visual art, Tanya encourages individuals to reflect on their values and perspectives, fostering greater awareness and empathy towards others.

3. Bridging Cultures and Perspectives

Tanya’s art serves as a powerful bridge that connects diverse cultures and perspectives. Her integration of abstract and figurative forms reminds us of the shared spiritual and unseen dimensions intrinsic to the human experience. Symbols, colors, and forms in her work carry cultural significance, fostering understanding and empathy among individuals from different walks of life. In a modern world often divided by differences, Tanya’s visual art unites us through a language that speaks to our shared humanity.

4. Enhancing Quality of Life

Anthropomorphs (2015-16)

In the hustle and bustle of modern life, Tanya’s work enriches our daily experiences by enhancing the aesthetics of our surroundings and fostering a sense of beauty and inspiration. Whether viewed in a gallery or a public space, her art uplifts our spirits and nurtures our souls. The presence of her art in communities contributes to a more vibrant and culturally rich society, promoting overall well-being and a profound sense of belonging.

5. Advocating for Cultural Preservation

Tanya’s work plays a vital role in advocating for cultural preservation and celebrating heritage. Her art draws inspiration from diverse cultural traditions, including the esoteric practices of Tantric artists from the Indian sub-continent and the spiritual explorations of Hilma af Klint. By incorporating these influences, Tanya’s art helps preserve and transmit cultural stories and traditions, fostering pride and continuity within communities. Her work serves as a reminder of our shared history and the importance of maintaining cultural legacies for future generations. Through visual art, Tanya promotes inclusivity and appreciation for the rich tapestry of human expression.

Conclusion

The significance of visual art in our modern world cannot be overstated. It serves as a universal language that enriches our lives, fosters empathy, and sparks critical dialogue across cultures and generations. By embracing and valuing visual arts, we preserve our cultural heritage, nurture creativity, and contribute to a more inclusive and enriched society for all.

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Concentric Story, Japan, Nakanojo Biennale (2023)

Travel Memoir

7 minutes read

I have some words in my mouth. They are like marbles circling around.

There are some words circling around my head too.

It is a dovegrey birdsong dawn up here in the mountains and I will try to string some of the words together like beads on a string.

I left my last night dreams at the bottom of the well, but I can still feel them at my feet, drifting like goldfish.

Here in Gunma, like everywhere really, life centres around water. There are rivers and hot running streams and springs and hotsprings. (of course, there is also dew and rain and sap and snow and nectar and blood and sweat and tears-all the ways She is).

My friend, Yuchi, a brightbutton human from Taipai, told me this yesterday: she has a friend in Taiwan who, while under hypnosis, remembered that she used to be a lake. In Canada. 

As a lake, she was told (I think by a neighbouring lake) that she will come back to a place where the people are very cute. She believes that is why she incarnated as a Taiwanese person. This woman, this lake, works with my friend in the Taipai Fine Art Museum. When there are no visitors, she does yoga and meditates in the rooms. Yuchi told me this story because I remind her of her lake-friend.

At the end of each day, me and the other artists go to onsen (hot springs). This very human and timeless ritual of bathing together and taking in the water. People go to certain onsen for certain healing benefits. The one in our village is very local and not-fancy. Just how I like. We meet the same old women there each evening and we laugh around with them a lot, chatting together in words we don’t really understand, but word-frequencies we all understand.

At the onsen you enter the space completely naked. All shapes of women from very old to little girls; all walking around naked and, seemingly, naturally inhabiting their bodies. You sit on small white plastic seats and lathers yourself completely under small showers. Some women are so sudded that they look like clouds. While I was not looking, I saw an old one watching herself in the mirror, lifting up her belly and breasts with her hands, standing taller. I saw her remembering her young body.

Gravity is a thing; all these breasts moving downwards, like fruit, like they have had enough of working so hard-feeding life. Like it is their turn to not be on duty.

Then you slide into the hot spring. Most women keep a small white towel on their heads, maybe it is wet with cold water. Everyone keeps their eyes private and unreaching until you are together in the spring-then you can start to chat around like birds. The local old ladies like to laugh.

It is so interesting to me, this culture, the social protocol is very reserved and respectful; one holds oneself very neatly. This conduct is juxtaposed with the very comfortable nakedness and also the way one eats together-everyone eating from small, shared dishes. Chopstick dancing.

I am living in a small traditional village called Kuni preparing work for the Nakanojo Biennale. Kuni is a shiny barnacle, perched on the side of a green and verdant mountain, overlooking a deep canyon and golden river. It is a traditional silkworm farming village. The mountains here look like Hokusai woodcuts, bamboo and cedar and pine and sumac and steep red cliffs. The forest is climbing all over each other, like children. In the morning, or after a thunderstorm, the silvery mist gathers and drifts in the valleys like petticoats.

One of the Japanese artists told me Kuni was/is a place revolutionaries would come to find refuge and the village people would protect them.

The people here are mostly elders. Their worlds are expanded some by the artists living here. Not all elders, though. Each morning at 7.23, a small girl walks by my window. She is always wearing a yellow helmet, blue tracksuit and has a bell. The bell, maybe for the bears, maybe for the monkeys? At 7 am there is recording of bells broadcasted over the village and at 12 pm and 5pm there is soft elevator music that sounds like Christmas carols reimagined.  Yesterday a black and shiny car arrived at my installation venue. Inside were three young cats, electronic music spilling out of the windows. They all had phones in their hands. Also, I met a young man who is a flower farmer. His eyes were flowers. After telling him, using body language, eye language and google translate, that I, too, grow flowers, he burst out “I like you. I love you!”. He told me he smoked some flowers like I grow and went into the forest where he was chased by a spirit.

The space in which I am working is an old Shugendo shrine, called Goma-do. This cosmology combines Tantric and Shinto Buddhism with animist shamanism. Their practice was/is to make pilgrimages in the mountains and meditate in cold waterfalls. My friend Masaki told me the name of this is translated as waterfallwork. Today I will go and do waterfallwork.

Before I affected the space I spent a morning meeting the spirits of the shrine. When I first touched an old text, a bee came shooting through the lattice door and buzzed all around my hand. I went and sat down by the altar and he (felt like a he) flew out of the shrine and back in to me. He vibrated all around my entire field. It was clear to me that he was checking me out, that he was/is an ancestor caretaker spirit. And that I needed to make offerings before I could reincarnate the shrine.

I climbed up into the hills behind Goma-do and left offerings of tea and rice on the rocks and small wooden and stone altars above the shrine. I then sat in the silvery drizzle-mist and spoke with the animate forces and the ancestors, the shamanic tantric practioners who walked this land and path before. I asked if I could enter the flow of creative consciousness that is the frequency of their practice. That I could get into the same river and flow in the same direction. As I sat, I felt a humming at my throat, around my head, and the electromagnetic experience of threshold and traverse.

I am humbled to be here on this riverbank.

My friend said to me yesterday that Life moves through us with sweat and blood and tears and beauty and love and offerings.

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