All is a Circle Within Me

Name: All is a Circle Within Me
Start: 2024-10-04T17:00:00-06:00
Location: Holter Museum of Art

Schedule

Fri Oct 04 2024 at 05:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

Holter Museum of Art | Helena, MT

If you happen to be in or around Helena, Montana this fall, stop in at the Holter Museum of Art to see my new exhibition, "All is a Circle Within Me," opening October 4th, 2024. There will be an artist talk in the gallery during the opening reception, and the show will on view until December 31st. The Celtic knots and the caribou hope to see you there!
"All is a Circle Within Me" is a new body of work that propounds the infinite and eternal interconnectedness of existence through two radically different modes of representation—one figurative and organic, the other abstract and geometric. The title references Nancy Wood’s poem of the same name, which ends with the following stanza: All is a circle within me./I have gone into the world and out again./I have gone to the edge of the sky./Now all is at peace within me./Now all has a place to come home.
“River of Their Passing,” the first piece in the exhibition, features a 60” x 500” “river” of caribou carrying salmon spirits back to the sea. In her book Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup'ik Eskimo Oral Tradition, Dr. Ann Fienup-Riordan observes how in the worldview of the Yup’ik people of Alaska, migrating salmon that have died after spawning leave their “canoes” on the banks of lakes and rivers so that their spirits may travel overland back to the ocean. The imagery in “River of Their Passing” draws on this conceptualization, and then further imagines the flesh of another migrating species, that of the caribou, assisting the salmon spirits in their terrestrial journey home. From this perspective, the bodies of the caribou become an alternate boat for the spirits of the salmon, alluding not only to an ongoing and unbroken circle of time, but also suggesting the co-mingling and interpenetration of the material and the spiritual, the corporeal and the incorporeal. “River of Their Passing” images an existence in which there is no real division between past, present and future, and in which there is no separation between the world of the living and the world beyond.
The second component of this body of work, “Blessings to the Seven Directions,” looks to sacred geometry and varying lineages of wisdom traditions that recognize both a horizontal and vertical structure of lived experience. It consists of a series of six 60” x 60” pieces: “North,” “East,” “South,” “West”, “Above,” and “Below.” The design of each work is structured around a Celtic infinity knot, a looped pattern that has no beginning and no end. The horizontal axis—north, east, south, west—refers to the temporal plane of life in which time is chronological and space is particular. The vertical axis—above and below—refers to the eternal plane in which time and space are unbounded. The human heart, situated at the intersection of the two axes, represents the seventh direction of “Center.” Taken together, the works constitute a symbolic sphere that embodies and blesses all dimensions and cycles of existence. Circular or wheel-like symbols used as teaching tools in contemplation or ceremony to establish and embody sacred space can can be found across a wealth of cultures and spiritual traditions, including Chinese depictions of the Four Guardians, Hindu and Buddhist mandalas, and the many variations of Native American Medicine Wheels or Sacred Hoops. Endless knots are not unique to the Celts, and can be found in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Kazakh symbolism. I find the widespread symbolism of the circle and the endless knot in historical and contemporary representations of space and time to evidence the true nature of our cosmos as eternal, intimately interwoven, and ordered by divine immanence.
All is a Circle Within Me seeks to immerse the viewer in two different but complementary allusions to the infinite. It is my hope that the works in this exhibition—”River of Their Passing” and “Blessings to the Seven Directions”—can serve as tools of contemplation and absorption, instilling in beholders a numinous sense of both deep peace and profound awe. I hope that the work will take audiences “into the world and out again,” to “the edge of the sky,” and full circle back “home.”