Now is the time to OOOOOOO, Pit Pony, Tortoise and Red Flower @ Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Sein und Werden Summer 2023.

 Editor: "Pit Pony" - Gosh, the pathos in this piece. The slumped, beaten-down sad face, the left leg to one side, the sense of the world’s ills or burdens being carried on its thin bony shoulders and back. An affecting piece. 

“Tortoise” –  This is a clever piece. The dull sheen and small details on the shell remind us that the Roman legions used to put all their shields together in a defensive, protective formation. 

 

"Now Is the Time to OOOO" - a surreal, slightly Nonsensical piece (note the capital “N”) that pleases and doesn’t outstay its welcome. You play on many of our myths, beliefs and superstitions regarding the Moon. My favourite image was, “she stretched the way a heron flies the canal” – perhaps because that is something I have seen in real life. “Pharaohs of the Nile rippled outward as she splashed” creates a vivid bow wave. Your opening declaration, “You cannot name anything that is not a cow” is eye-catching and amusing. At an unconscious level, this piece riffs on our nursery rhyme memories of the cow that jumped over the Moon. 

The editor's take was that Now is the Time to  OOOOOOO .is "a surreal, slightly Nonsensical piece (note the capital “N”) that pleases and doesn’t outstay its welcome. You play on many of our myths, beliefs and superstitions regarding the Moon. My favourite image was, “she stretched the way a heron flies the canal” – perhaps because that is something I have seen in real life. “Pharaohs of the Nile rippled outward as she splashed” creates a vivid bow wave. Your opening declaration, “You cannot name anything that is not a cow” is eye-catching and amusing. At an unconscious level, this piece riffs on our nursery rhyme memories of the cow that jumped over the Moon."  “Sein” has a rich tradition of publishing surreal work so I am glad to take this story.A Zoom event held to inaugurate this publication heard these notes to the three sculptures that appear. Zoom launch video here  Passcode: tA0+8&PK 

Pit Pony spent his life at the bottom of a coal mine. He is the last of his kind. The split on his leg is where it was broken. It healed and it got him back up in the air again. There's no point to a broken pit pony. What can he pull? Our editor observes, “The slumped, beaten-down sad face, the left leg to one side, the sense of the world’s ills or burdens being carried on its thin bony shoulders and back.” More on Pit Pony can be found at Animal Wilderness blog-spot.

 

 

Tortoise [Carrying Pot]

In the original Tortoise Carrying Pot of raw clay there are blues of cobalt carbonate and oxide, rutile, a green nickel carbonate and yellow iron oxide. None of them would fire as such. The pink and blacks would be blue. After I brought it home from the studio I couldn't touch it when unveiled the next morning. What use is the potter? I had rolled out B mix clay, laminated with dark brown Jamaica clay and the last found clays of that bag, took it down to 1/4 inch, laid it on a board, sifted on the oxides, pounded in the acanthus woodcut, pressed a cedar shim in ledges, rolled it up round a plastic tube, picked it up, set it on end and let it dry a little. When I took off the tube to pack newspaper inside the whole thing collapsed in a sheet. Using my chest and hands (I had rolled the papers up in a big ball) I stuffed the newspapers inside, picked it up and bounced it on the board, because otherwise it wouldn't sit up. When I saw the tortoise I got a chill. 

Desert tortoises are centenarians. I came to know them through an old Indian agent neighbor of Nogales. who had a breeding pair and incubated eggs and gave nestlings away. He had his phone numbers painted on their backs, for they would wander. When he died his yard was left open so I hosted the two, who had many more progeny. Every sight of the female is an occasion for rejoicing, the way she stands, sits, walks, lifts a leg, her head. The idea of Ko, "as the Shwo Wan explains it," is "of now walking, now halting, as the tortoise, traveling at ease in the untroubled mind," the essence of Kwang- tzu Tao, where "the largest and smallest creatures do not pass judgment on one another but equally find their happiness.” Chuang Tzu.

 Red Flower

I would like to think these Flower Guys, as my grand daughter calls them, are reintegrative, joining, rejoining the natural and the human in one fabric, human bodies with flower tops. My son as a cardiac nurse wanted a couple because he thought they looked like hearts. This "way into the flowering heart" seeks me out from all the Pennsylvania Dutch mythology of the flowering heart transferred to these vessels. Neighbor,  Ken Morrison, who wrote tellingly of the Wabanaki, said these people believed that inviting the lost, fragmented, rejected and rejecting spirit into the family, honoring him, her or it with family titles, father, father-in-law, implicitly comforting them, clothing and reclothing them, and feeding them real food, which means the food of the soul so they do not have to eat the hearts of the enemies in ritual cannibalism or famine, giving them children to play with, brings them back from their cold into the warmth of the hearth and home and kin. Let the Flower Guys see that whenever two people look into each other's faces the eyes of others are present, for there is a trace of a third person present in every face we encounter.  This is the intimate trace of consciousness we awake in the public nature of our words and language itself, turning every meeting between one person and another into a meeting that must include the whole of humanity, living and dead.  It goes without saying that not one detail from any moment at all is lost of our deeds, words and thoughts. Each one goes back to its root to carry on in the worlds among the pure superior lights. Renditions of Flower Guys appear at the FB group, Forms of the Formless.