star-crossed lovers
for sale: $444
contact: spiralunwinding(at)gmail.com
acrylic on 11 x 14 wood panel
drawn from the various rock figures / faces / beings in the Sinks Canyon and surrounding lands in Lander, Wyoming. Originally called ‘the Council’ in reference to the unique placements and proximities that these stone faces had with each other and the feeling of gathering there. But that title shifted after some time spent exploring the areas where they existed. Anthropomorphism is a term that suggests that we project our human characteristics on the world around us. But I want to turn this concept on its head. These faces were here, long before I could ever lay eyes on them in this body. We were made in the image of the land, all elements within are those that are without. These faces in the rocks witnessed the glacier that formed the canyon and still feeds the Poppotasche in its steady recession. Generations upon generations from now, the headwaters of the river at what is now called Christina Lake will be gone. But it has had many names, and it has embodied many forms. I see these faces and I wonder at the memory of stones and how water is the conduit for all life. Timeless. I feel how energies reach continuously through an infinite permanence. Where a desire for destiny can still exist in the ebb and flow and love is not just a hallmark card trick but a real, tangible, earthen, wild thing. But it runs so far beyond what we can see. I remember the voices I heard when I would walk those hills and they weren’t me – they belonged to something else, from somewhere else. It was mystery. I listen to the stories of who and what ends up in a place so magnetic as the canyon and her surrounding kin. Love is the common thread of it all. A place of abundant and nutrient rich food, activated by all the glacial trace minerals in the soils that never got trodden downstream from agricultural damage, and so vast in its variety and unity of ecosystems. A place with an intention all of its own and indifferent to us. A place that we can recognize by how it provides and reflects.
