I am a clay artist finding the form of life as I find form in clay
I am a sculptor making female figures which erupt from the clay, my hands, and my imagination in dynamic pursuit of life as a celebration.
It is being an artist searching for the truth of who women are that forces me to speak with words as well as the sculptures which express the idea in form. This sculpture asserts the possibility of common knowledge and allegiance to the truth of women’s creative potential as a gateway to a planet free of abuse, annihilation, and intoxication, lying with impunity, greed, lust, and squandering the gifts. We must keep this gateway open and draw people to it which now I attempt to do with words.
I will show how my thinking developed and how my voice gained authenticity; how I came to goddess and women’s issues from deep study of Native American traditions. My teacher called himself a Twisted-hair Medicine man, one who weaves together the teachings of many tribes and makes them a new whole thing. He taught me how to lead the transformational ceremonies that brought many of these insights.
Revealed to me was the recognition that the feminine was not being celebrated in women’s lives as I gradually remembered my own abuse and the predominance of abuse in our land and the huge numbers who are suffering because of the abuse they endured.
Much of this abuse is sexual abuse and it points to our imbalance around our sexual energy and it distorts all aspects of our lives because sexual energy is at the very core of our being. A fundamental right and blessing of life has been shredded into a torment, a power tool, a mechanism for control. Abuse and its disruption of sexual energy is a central issue for our society that is not recognized or talked about. We have been cast away from sexuality’s capacity to provide delight and energy for activity, to raise the human condition to a celebration of life, and to access the core of our own being. Without orgiastic connection to our own fundamental nature we function in an imbalanced, untruthful way, out of sync with natural ebb and flow of life, making choices and decisions that are not connected to the truth of ourselves and that do not serve the planet: dams are built and water diverged without attention to what is being lost; nuclear energy is encouraged with full knowledge that there is no known method to safely dispose of nuclear waste; products are packaged with materials that fill up land-fills; water is sold in containers that harm the drinker and refuse to degrade in land-fills; recycled paper is not finding its way to paper towels and toilet paper; mothers toss disposable diapers on the asphalt in the parking lot and teenagers and grandparents toss their gum wrappers, then their gum, their cigarettes, their coffee cups and beer cans out the window into the blooming lupin; young girls are carried across borders or just down the street to be sold into prostitution. People smile indifferently at each other without paying any attention. Words are exchanged without knowledge or understanding being sought or extended. We continue to expand our cities beyond their boundaries cutting down orange orchards, vineyards, covering rich strawberry-growing soil with track-houses and shopping malls. The people who buy these homes sit tense and hunched and crawling on the freeways breathing each others fumes and dreaming of seeing their baby’s first steps. Masturbation is condemned and sexual impropriety in the oval office is easier to talk about as lying and perjury than as inappropriate sexual behavior by a highly respected leader. Children are left to their own devices while Mom and Dad work two to four jobs to pay for the SUV assault-weapon, the second home computer, and the six-foot TV screen. Deprived of the full power of our sexual energy, we function inadequately in our lives obviously making poor choices that could be avoided if our minds and bodies were properly tuned by high-level sexuality. Our unwillingness to talk about sexuality and own it as a fundamental right and blessing containing the energy to activate inner knowing is the other-side of our blind, willy-nilly over-production, over-consumption, and over-weight gross national product.
