crone
wraps the shawl around her
in a way of sayingi’m enough –
sits in front of our block
her old bones chilled –warming now, us seeing her
knowing we want her,
the wise crone in our lives
Here’s another energetic work by Kevin Meagher, from his recent show at Callan Park Gallery; a work dripping with death, time and transformation. From the Kali entry in Wikipedia:
The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself. In the Pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly seeks to confront Kali, and thereby assimilates and transforms her into a vehicle of salvation.
Kevin Meagher
Blood Kali Change
Meagher’s work is, for me, a Yantra, a refined instrument of analysis, a conception of how Blood becomes Kevin becomes Blood, how Jesus / Kali /Venus / Mars is the facilitator for a deep and necessary internal reorganisation that must take place: a matter of life and death for the artist. Or it’s something else! Something so mysterious that we’re returned finally to the work itself as carrier of archetypal content that has no other means of exposition.
I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I was fascinated by mirrors. My mother had a bedroom dresser with wing mirrors, and it was endlessly interesting to tilt the mirrors so that they reflected each other – creating an infinite cool-blue recursion of reflections that flipped my mind. Interspersing my head into that zone of recursion and seeing myself, a pale kid, somehow involved in, but not understanding, this mystery, was one thing; removing my head but wanting, at the same time, to know what was happening while I was absent (the recursion now presumably spotless) was quite other ache.
Mark West, at his regular Thursday night meeting in the Cross, was on fire last night. I felt for a couple of new arrivals, who (my concern only) might have been struggling with the breadth of material on offer.
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In May, Callan Park Gallery hosted an energetic exhibition of ceramics and works on paper by Kevin Meagher, an Outsider who’s been hospitalised for some time and who has developed his practice through the Pioneer Clubhouse in Balgowlah. He’s also taken an Artist in Residence role at Macquarie Hospital in North Ryde.
Kevin’s work is brimming with mythological and spiritual associations – and there is a real experience here of someone struggling to find where he fits into the vast staggering schemes of Norse, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Christian and Egyptian myth. And the inquiry is conducted with an urgency that conveys its importance to him, and sucks the viewer in to his worlds.
(Left, Neal Hawke, and right, Ben and Tim at War.)
For me, Kevin is involved in the classic “Who Am I?” question, with a fury and commitedness brought on by obviously distressing and bewildering personal states. I love his disregard for artistic style, and also for his daring iconoclasm – I’ll post some more of his intriguing works over the next few weeks.
(Works on paper in the top image are Shiva the Bee, Jewel Tree and Super Bella; ceramics are Ra Uranus, Iris Mary, Dianna Venus, Neptune Lir and Ganga Ocean. )
Some beautiful pieces from around about.
Not Findable but Undeniable – Randall Friend:
The subject of any and all experiences is empty – it is not locatable – it has no attributes… That subject is not a thing from which you are knowing – it is the knowing – it is like an open space or capacity. It is a mysterious, unexplainable, indescribable presence by which the world, body and mind are known… there is no light which can illuminate the subject – it cannot become objectified.
Finding Our True Home – Tracy Cochran:
…the word [nostalgia] is a learned formation of Greek compounds, consisting of “nostos,” meaning “returning home,” a Homeric word, and “algos,” “pain” or “ache.” Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Homer’s tales knows that the desire to return home is the most powerful and galvanizing of all longings. According to this great teacher [Jeanne de Salzmann], we humans wish for Being the way Odysseus yearned to see his wife and house and homeland again.
Questions and ‘Answers’ about Nonduality – Nicholas Powiull:
Thoughts cannot be identified with, they are a conditioning taught to us from a small age. Nothing really ever identifies with thought other than thought. So nobody is really thinking those thoughts. They are completely connected to what unfolds in the environment. As a way of saying it, you could say they are the environment thoughts, for without the environment no thoughts would be stimulated.
We suffer unnecessarily because we do not know ourselves. Like addicts fiercely clinging to a drug, we cannot let go of the sense that we are substantial, solid, independent, and autonomous. We lay schemes large and small to acquire and to harm—all grounded in this false apprehension of how we exist, who we are as living beings. On behalf of this exaggerated self, with fear, anger, and pride, we harm others. To nurture and to satisfy each passing whim of this exaggerated self, we build up our greed. Yet the path of greed and harm does not at all lead us toward happiness; it is samsara, the cyclic path of dissatisfaction and misery. Over and over again, moment after moment, we fall into this trap we have unwittingly built for ourselves. Like an addict’s drug, the false notion of an independently existing self is the source of great misery for ourselves and others.
* Tao Te Ching
Here’s the entry from my Outsider Art calender for June – and having enjoyed the work just about every day this month I can attest to its power and, somewhat surprisingly to me, its sense of serenity.
Paraphrasing from the calendar notes: “Eddie Arning grew up on his father’s farm in Germania, Texas. Bouts of depression and anger eventually culminated in an attack on his strict Lutheran mother. His hospitalisation for dementia praecox lasted for about 30 years. He was encouraged to draw by nursing staff. He was finally asked to leave his nursing home and went to live with his widowed sister, however, he never drew again.”
Eddie Arning
Woman with White Dog
Cray-Pas on paper, 63 x 48 cm (approx)
* Dogen, 
Unpacking some books from storage after our recent renovation, I chanced upon Jessie Tatlock’s Greek and Roman Mythology, a primer in the subject and a first edition from 1917. (You can find on-line, PDF and other versions of this beautiful little book here.)
The book has lots of lovely black and white photographs of statuary, friezes and vases – then (and probably still) held in a wide variety of collections. I particlarly enjoyed a small plate (Fig 42) of Cybele and her Car and was pleased to see, on a Google search, that this impresive work is still held by the Metropolitan Museum. Here she is (her “car” has now become a “cart” – makes sense in today’s language) and here is what Tatlock says of her:
Rhea, the mother of the gods,was also an earth-goddess. The people of Asia Minor knew her as Cybele or the Great Mother, and represented her crowned with a turreted crown like the wall of a city; for she was the bringer of civilization, the protectress of cities. Lions drew her chariot, and about her were the Corybantes, who acclaimed her with shouts and the clashing of cymbals, and led her worship with wild dances.
Quite a woman! And whoever the maker was, quite a sculptor! I don’t believe such a work could come into existence without that maker truly being immersed in the reality of Cybele; the Great Mother was not just a concept, rather, was a truly lived experience (that in turn energised the art-making).
So turning now to the Gulf oil spill, here’s a powerful critique of this situation by Naomi Klein:
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.
This, for me, is what we’ve now lost: the lived, experiential reality of the Great Mother archetype, that, if collectively experienced, could be a natural restrainer to our heroic desires for exploitation of the earth. Cybele cries out for this, and the Corybantes clash their cymbals.
(Left, another depiction of Cybele, imbued with mystery, with the living energy of the golden earth – such gold to be revered where it lies, rather than being exploited mercilessly in commerce.)
