Corona
This 1921 Corona 3 portable typewriter has such an elegant design, I couldn't resist using it as part of a sculpture that relates to the avian wing, with its beauty and symbolic implications.
The Latin root of the word Corona means garland or crown.1 The Greek root refers not only to a crown but to other curved objects 2, and has the same root word, korax, that is used for the bird family Corvidae3, ravens and crows.
1.,2.,American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition, 1975, Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., NYNY
3.,Oxford Languages website, https://languages.oup/google-dictionary-en/
Searching for the Antidote
Sometimes a book can really change you. Or solidify your worldview.
The 1978 book "The Road to Eleusis, Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries," by Carl A.P. Ruck, R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, is one of those books for me.
I have always identified personally with the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as many other modern women I'm sure still do.
One of the finest examples of the story, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, is included within The Road to Eleusis, starting the reader on the road to the death of old ideas and rebirth of new ones that happens as you digest the essence of the book: the origin of Western tradition included the use of psychedelic medicinal plants.
Western culture, philosophy, religion, had at their core transformative experience through entheogenic plants and knowledge through non-ordinary states.
For me personally, this book and the ongoing dialogue it has created and the other books that have followed have allowed for a rewriting of what we have been sold as the "Apollonian" ideal.
This line of inquiry allows for the "Dionysian" to regain its once central role in forming the consciousness and conscience, of Western thought.
The return of Eleusis to our minds also gives us permission to admit that in that particular historical period, and for centuries afterward, women were the backbone of what our cultural memory loss has only remembered in anecdotes but instead was an institution that lasted for two thousand years.
This ritual transformation of rebirth through a cthonic realm of the feminine had the effect, for many, of the loss of fear of death.
My interest in this body of knowledge comes at a time referred to as the Psychedelic Renaissance, when the researchers and doctors have become suddenly very accepting of the subcultures' entheogens, for the purpose of medicalization as a treatment of societal ills. Contradictions abound in the ensuing conversation of how do we do this, how do we unbreak what we have broken? Does having a near-religious experience invoked by a drug with ancient receptors in our brains help us? Looks that way.
How can scientifically trained doctors ethically walk patients into spiritual realms, without a road map?
How can the Sacred survive the modern world where violence, inequality and environmental degradation thrive? Can monetizing our consciousness possibly lead to equity?
The Road is a long journey and the questions are painful but it is important because "entheogens are autochthonous with Western society, but have become forbidden by authoritarian sociopolitical forces that began in antiquity and continue forcefully to this day".1
1. The Road to Eleusis, foreward by Huston Smith, pg. 6, pp. 2.
Pagan Bookend
This bronze sculpture was created as a compliment to the sculpture "Searching for the Antidote", which is also a bookend and can both be used as stand alone art works.
Both sculptures represent a monument to the cycle of death and rebirth. Please read the paragraph I wrote for The Search for the Antidote for more.
A fluted bowl spills rich bounty including nuts, mushrooms and berries. There is a sense of harvest but also of decay. A tiny anatomical model human head rests on top the pile, binding the human condition and the over ripe bounty of the earth together in a short arc.
The vessel form is reminiscent of the Greek Cornucopia, a visual symbol of death and rebirth and fecundity that mirrors nature's cycles and those of agricultural societies.
"Mutation"
The truncated and mutated body of an octopus begins to return to a new form of life as mushrooms reanimate and repurpose it. Nature can evolve equally extravagant and horrific responses to pressure in the environment. Octopuses have been found with dozens of extra arms, as just one example.
Humans are currently causing and experiencing mutations in the natural world and in the artificial ones we've created.
Some are a sign of trouble and some are a delicacy, some are an unintended consequence and some are cultivated.