Un- has been around since 2003 as a poem, posted at my old art site. Recently I wanted to explore again the potential crossover between text and the (spatial) field that I’m so interested in, and I’ve made a few (sometimes failed!) attempts at this in the past. I find it a hard thing to do, to enable a synthesis of text and the spatial, the visual. Anyway, here’s the latest attempt to put the Un-poem back into its spatial field. The poem itself is about the underlying field, the noumenal, the enabler from which all springs. This is Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund:
The mysterious teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund, about the abyss, without foundation, dark and irrational, prior to being, is an attempt to provide an answer to the basic question of all questions, the question concerning the origin of the world and of the arising of evil. The whole teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund is so interwoven with the teaching concerning freedom, that it is impossible to separate them, for this is all part and parcel of the same teaching. And I am inclined to interpret the Ungrund, as a primordial meonic freedom, indeterminate even by God.
Ron Dowd
Un-, 2008
linocut, 30 x 30 cm
(As an aside, if you go to the 2003 page, the liquid “Ungrund” you see is a photo I took of a natural mud pool in my home town of Rotorua, New Zealand. Growing up in that city I was often aware that we rested on a volcanic abyss.)
So how do we get to new business cards, seemingly a dimensional shift, from the sublime to the mercantile? Well my wife and fellow psychotherapist Amanda Gruhn (Karima) made the leap, saw the work as a potential carrier of what we do in our separate practices, and what we do when we work together with couples – there’s a kind of un-ing that occurs here before pre-existing seeds can sprout.
We next took the concept to Danielle Kojic (who as well as being a graphic designer is a subtle Gestalt psychotherapist) and she moved the work further, until we ended up with the cards below. And giving the cards to people is a lovely continuation of the energy of their gestation.
(Along with the cards goes a new web site, Therapy Duo.)
