NEW Groundspring Series
After returning home from the Iberian Peninsula a few months ago a sculptural series emerged that I am calling Groundspring. I was living in a small village, located on a fault line, with a plentitude of natural springs. The geological fault in quartzitic formation fractured and displaced the rock formation about 300 meters, which may have created conditions for the emergence of mineral and medicinal water sources that the small town, Castelo de Vida, is known for. I became fascinated with visiting the springs throughout the town and in the hills. Each spring felt like a threshold: a portal through stone, time, and elemental matter from which life quite literally wells up.
Upon returning home I listened to Robert Macfarlane’s new audiobook, “Is a River Alive?” and started thinking of groundspring as a metaphor for personal and societal fracture and regeneration. Questions began surfacing from within:
What, in my personal life, has been taken so abruptly, violently and unexpectedly so as to fracture the very ground I stand on?
What in the epochal spirit of our times —our societal ‘fault lines’— is fracturing?
What subterranean forces are stirring below the surface in our collective unconscious?
What ancient wisdom might be surfacing now as a source of renewal?
I am interested in fracture as a generative force, and a necessary disruption, that creates conditions for something new. I question how to be with both the violence and the vitality of this process, which reflects not only earth’s deep time but the pressing societal and ecological urgencies of our present day
…and I am reminded of Donna Haraway’s audiobook I listened to in the depths of winter, “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene”….
more will be revealed.