Moonlight Through Glass
A development of distortion and layering, the mind reaching to the point of creation, and the ghosts and shadows that reside there..... Images as prints, images as sequences in book form, a slow-motion unfolding...
This series of works, and the subsequent explorations of the theme, came about whilst designing the cover for my collection of poems called "Moonlight Through Glass". The starting off point was a colour image created from scratch using very simple Photoshop processes (that image was also the start of a much earlier project on the Mahavidya Goddesses). Simple shifts in tone created an interesting sequence of images, I think.
The theme is now become linked to an exploration of Universal Night, a metaphysical and divine metaphor for existence manifesting from and within the cosmos. In Indian mythology and cosmography this revealing of cosmic reality is explored through the Mahvidyas, ten aspects of the Great Goddess of Night.....
At the moment there are several styles: manipulation of tonal layers that give a sense of surface and solidity, and a further distortion and layering that produces more etched or engraved effects. Haven't decided yet whether they work together or are best in their own sequences.....
...though I quite like the question-answer, outer-inner, described- delineated contrast. An essay in points of view......
The described forms of the Goddess are quite wild, but images still tend to be couched in the standard iconography of Indian religious art, and somewhat stultified male viewpoint too. With these violent, dynamic voids and vortices I quite like the way the eye/mind conjures figures, beings, gestures, faces from out of the darkness - a fitting metaphor......
Maps of the void....mappa mundi....alchemical scribblings......Robert Fludd.....Blake and Dore......Taoist magical talismans....the sensations of somatic nightmare, or of transcendent bliss........
This is a black and white version of my print "Shri Yantra Manifesting". It fits in thematically here, as well as polytheistically, and like other images it will be a start point for distortional explorations, mirroring and transcending itself...
Miminalist music, chant, ritual - the repeated exploration of themes, going beyond the beyond... slight variations initiating vast evolutions, a new species of image and of thought.... or a recapitulation of something dismissed as inconsequential and forgotten....
The education of the eye, giving the gift of patience to the brain, teasing out meaning, choosing form....uncertainty principle... stare into the darkness and patterns will appear. Are they born from the inside or the outside? Are your eyes open or shut? Understanding as an emotional flavour....
Cymatics - the art of creating the shape of sound... how things begin... the very big and the very small, and who can say which is which?
the patterns of galaxies and neurons, gas clouds, seed vapours, progenitors, mystery of beginnings
White noise, black holes, dark matter, Dark Mother..the impulse to expand outwards.....
I am hoping to combine some of this type of work with words, images, poems, fragments as a sort of metaphysical workbook or act of contemplation. The words too will be treated as images in the same way, a sort of non-iluminated manuscript......