The image draws me in to its primordial world, which evokes a sense of bursting open… rupturing

Drawing the bones has ignited a curiosity about death rituals in Bali, Indonesia, where I am living right now. Most Balinese Hindus cremate their dead but around 2 hours from Ubud is a remote village and home to the Bali Mula (meaning ‘original’), the island's original inhabitants, who practice a unique Trunyan funeral ritual. 

I am reminded of what drew me to clay in the first place…a quickening in my heart…a vitality flooding through my body...an inner life force stirred by contact with this earthy material.

Listening with the ears of the heart is a kind of silence, but it is not necessarily the absence of sound. It’s the kind of listening I do when I am in relationship with clay and the name of this clay form…or maybe it is Mitsuba named after the wild Japanese parsley I learned about today through a chance meeting.

This is my kind of museum…walking narrow streets through Seto and Tokomane seeing remnants of old coal burning kilns, pottery shards/artifacts/tools, dodome heki walls, chimney stacks and black tar covered buildings take me back into a time and place when the air was filled with sooty smoke from the coal burning kilns that blanket the hillsides.

Bone by bone this instinctual, feminine, passionately creative wild nature (in me) is re-membered and in service to clay. 

Last night I received a dream where I drove right past a huge house on fire. Everything became white light and I felt an enormous amount of heat all through my body.

Forces of nature are literally natural phenomena and a natural phenomenon is an observable event which is not man-made.

We come to threshold moments in our lives when a pivot will change our lives forever….

Clay body tests from foraged clay in northern British Columbia, on the ancestral lands of the Tsimshian people of Kitsumkalum.