One... everything returns to one...
I like these little winks from existence when they appear in the tide line. Yes, this is what remains of a Firestone tire... an ironic artifact of our modern consumer culture... a piece of tire carrying a spiritual message... the word ‘one’... the concept of both unity and singularity... simultaneously only and all.
One... everything is one.
Something very sublime is happening here....
There are little land plants beginning a life at sea... however one of those little tufts holds a secret... it is the nest of a kingfisher. This is a very unusual place for a kingfisher to nest... I think perhaps the top of the pole has rotted out and there must be a little cavern... kingfishers usually nest in holes in the cliffs. I hope they return this year.
There is a place further down the coast where they have been nesting for many years in the remains of an ancient tree... the branch were they sit and observe the bay is polished hard and smooth by generations of movements of little bird feet.
I have a fascination with sea caves...
The moment you move into a sea cave there is a definitive shift... the everyday harmony and proportion of the senses is revised. The light is dim... the cave is dank and dripping. The air is suspended heavy around you... you become very aware of your skin... sound does not travel in a familiar way... you can taste the ocean as you breathe. Looking in... the usual horizon lines are not there but perspective is amplified sharp.
These caves are formed by the power of the ocean and qualities of this force are made visible by the existence of the caves. Other forces are made visible to us... the interior formations also manifest the form and power of resistance.
It was once the belief here that humans had two souls... the landscape was teeming with supernatural powers and places... spirits dwelt in all things.... the lives of the creatures were sacred and souls of beings wove their paths back and forth between worlds. Ravens were gods...
I know it is difficult to see this image of Raven... the gods nailed to a board. This is a somber and disturbing image for the first day of Spring... but look closer there are little blossoms and soon the raven heads will be obscured by the life of the peach tree... life goes on.
Life goes on for the ravens also... I live here among them... when I first came here they were very curious about me and they would walk around on my deck and jump up to look into the windows... I assume to see what I was doing. They have a complex language and I believe they have named me... whenever they are close by and I come out of my house there is a particular phrase they repeat every time.
Three days ago they began collecting sticks... relaying them to their nesting site... soon there will be new ravens.
I believe that we have as a culture become deeply separated from the things we need the most... the beauty and spirit of natural world... for myself I try to be vigilant in my reconnection to the nature of this place ...especially considering that we as beings may now be down to one soul.
Not only do we seek to manifest patterns of understanding on the natural world but we also impose aspects of ourselves... we have been doing this since the caves... but not always in the obvious way... Sculptors that do portraits in clay must be mindful that they do not blend their own image within that of their subject... as humans we touch our faces and forms thousands of times each day ...a chimera of our own form resides in our hands and it is transposed outward in unexpected ways. Think of Venus in the stones in my photographs... she is only there because I told you she was there by naming her. Also, by naming her in a certain way you were able to approach my experience... at that time I was not experiencing rock walls and sea caves... I was deeply in grief... so I saw my sorrow. The resonance between form and meaning it tightly wound in our primitive mind and it will manifest itself in wondrous ways...
I certainly did not assume that residing in the wild beauty of this place I would be able to approach an unmediated experience of nature and elemental chaos... but I did assume that I could explore photographically the relationship between the self and the primal landscape and how that landscape resides in consciousness. I believed that the landscape was itself a way of seeing and that the cameras while complicating that experience could provide a visual fulcrum with which to shift the axis of my perceptions.
Very early on this little beauty appeared... it is an oracle... those little stones are actually words... and she definitely has something mythological on her mind.
I lived in Italy for a time before I came here... that was over a decade ago...
I adore Italian culture... but life in Venice was an intensely mediated experience.
Acres of gilding ...alters and triptychs ...cut stones and bones ...angels and puttis ...pastries & shiny tiny spoons ...so many wickets for tickets & styled food ...countless madonnas rising through tempra clouds ...eroded frescoes with endless foldings of flowing drapery ...undulating walks up and down a thousand bridges ...thin towels and cold marble floors ...constantly turning corners ...vaulted basilicas with the sounds all wrong ...sitting in rococo chairs and neighborhood squares ...I felt I had been stuffed to the back of the Medieval junk drawer ...people still talked about the plague! The only open landscapes lay suffocating in the corners of Bellini’s panel paintings... ..one morning I had enough I was saturated with cultural beauty... my wild heart had been hammered thin as a piece of gilding gold by the weight of visual history ...I had to get home so like Giacometti’s woman I walked.
Now I live here at the beach ...a tiny spark of consciousness in a place of wild natural beauty... returned to my childhood landscape...
it is this landscape that now participates in my inner and outer world and is the subject of my photographic work.
Our consciousness seeks patterns... although this pattern seeking is likely a survival mechanism there is certainly an acquired cultural inflection to this area of perception.
In the natural landscape that which evokes a significant visual experience is appended to an underlying philosophy or vision. The patterns that rise up from chaos to create part of our experience are actually a manifestation of our consciousness... not an insight into the visual nature of existence. When we move through a landscape we are not just flowing through a topography we are also moving through our own subconscious projections and philosophies.
Full moon last night....
Moonlight makes a restless night for me. There is only light from the night sky here so when the moon is full it’s light will wake me... or perhaps what wakes me is the creatures... there is a lot of nocturnal hunting going on at the full moon.
So... I was up watching the night sky and thinking about Icarus... you know... if he had taken flight by moonlight he would have escaped the maze and his fatal fall... and I would never have photographed him as a memento mori on the sands of my beach.
My images of Icarus initiated a conceptual flight of my own... Icarus was a visual metaphor for how deeply my experience in the landscape was an acquired cultural construct. My cultural inheritance was creating an ambiguous play between what I believed and what I perceived... what was known and what was seen. I was engaged with a consensual reality... I had actually never experienced or photographed the beach as it truly was.
Human beings are pattern seekers... we devise constructs to distill and organize an unfathomable and vast mystery.
Ice and snow last night...
everything is transformed... even the puddles are busy being new
