grand mother, 2023

The series of works title Grand Mother evolved during my artist residency in Zaczernie, Poland — in a landscape inhabited for centuries by my ancestors and where our DNA continues.  Working with pigments gleaned from the surrounding area on a cotton rag paper, hand made in Łódż, the pieces contemplate patterning and consciousness — patterns and forms in the natural world interpreted as patterns made by the human hand. Generations of gesture, in interplay of human/nature.  

In part inspired by traditional embroidery and crochet patterns, in themselves interpretations of forms and patterns in nature both as decoration and talisman —-welcoming beauty, transformation and warding off negative forces — the collection of drawings, express a grid like structure with both loose and precisely drawn dots.

The grid drawn with rose ink, created from a bush down the lane towards the community fields, reflect on the cyclically etched lines in the earth in preparation for planting, systems of mapping and organization, of warp and weft, space and time, north, south, east, west and with blessing.

Dots drawn with chalk and the charcoal remnants from a fire pit in the field, ochres ground from a discarded old clay brick in a nearby waste pile and spring birch pollen from my family’s yard bound with Pascal yoke, bits of memory gathered and expressed in a code and as seeds of potentiality. 

… where painting is not painting but writing spirit into a visual image through prayer and mineral pigments mixed with egg yolk and dry wine or vinegar, becoming endowed with miraculous capacity, even autonomous healing powers…

from Book of Earth by Heidi Gustafson