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The Cloak Wants to be Performed

This is the Cloak I began early this year, at that time I was calling it "Cape."  I went to an artist's residency in Mexico with the intention of making a fiber cocoon, in which to perform my embodiment process.  What I ended up making was a wearable piece that must be performed to fulfill its purpose, as the testimony that it is.

As of now I have publicly perfomed the Cloak three times.  It could be said the Cloak has performed itself through me.

Here is the latest performance, done with a very small group in Egg Harbor, WI.  The final piece lasted over 2 hours.

A few video segments...

In this segment I explain how the Cloak came to be...

Visit my YOUTUBE channel here 

Before that performance I did a livestream performance with the Cloak, which involved a reading of "The Ship of Skeletons."

And finally, the first performance, which took place in Mexico, at the Zocalo in Puebla. 

 

It has become evident to me that the Cloak is a garment of initiation, and being an initiatic process, the Cloak is changing as I change.  The entire experience is metamorphic, being documented as a living testimony to the experience of becoming through change in the time and the world I live in.

More information about the residency ARQUETOPIA

                                     

The Ship of Skeletons

This is the story of two initiations, one initiation into a World that has been created and decided by Fear, and one initiation into a Future that has Yet to be Created.

     Once, and once, and once again [within a time existing side by side with many other times] there was a child.  This child was a girl to the world, but she was not yet known to herself as that.  She could have been anything, because, in fact, she knew herself as everything before her.  She did not yet know the world that separates every thing from another, with lines and words and definitions.  She was not yet in that world, nor was it in her.  Her world floated in and through spectrums of color and light and choral harmonies, becoming, revealing, filling.  

The Cape

     One day the girl’s father gathered his family, with news of a journey.  It was time to travel to a New World.  In order to get to this New World, the family would take a long journey together, on an enormous passenger ship.  The ship had many levels with even more hallways, and those hallways had even more rooms.  The ship also had a ship doctor, and when the child saw this man the hair on the back of her neck stood up and sent a cold wave spiraling through her spine.  

Close up - Ancestry Cloth

     The girl and her family had boarded the ship, and they sailed farther and farther from the shore she had always known. The hallways and rooms in the ship became darker and darker.  The child felt confused and lost, with no horizon to orientate herself to.  It seemed as if the ship moved furiously in no direction, towards nothing.  It seemed to the girl as if she could travel up flights of stairs and through long hallways for hours and never reach the main deck.  In time, her eyes acclimated to the darkness, and in the darkness she hid.  It was from this hiding place she spotted the ship doctor talking to her father and her mother.  He told her parents that each family member would require a special surgery before entering the New World.  One by one the girl child watched her family members disappear into the doctor’s quarters.  First her father went in, the door closed and she could no longer hear nor see anything that was happening inside.  When he at last reappeared from the operating room, the child covered her mouth and screamed. It was a scream only she could hear inside of her own head.  Her father was now a skeleton, walking and talking as if nothing had changed, except he had no flesh, no hair, no eyes. The girl remained in her hiding place as her mother disappeared and then, hours later, reappeared as a skeleton.  When the doctor left his room to find her brother, the girl ran down the halls of the ship, calling and crying to her brother, to warn him of the doctor’s true intent.  But the only one who heard her cries was the doctor, so she ran and hid.  This time she hid underneath the operating table.  From there, she thought, she could warn her brother.  But her fear had taken her voice, and all she could do was curl her body tightly into itself and listen to the sound of a knife cutting and cutting and cutting into flesh.

Film Still - Ancestry Cloth Performance 

     The child knew now that she would never be able to come out from under that table without also losing her flesh and her eyes and her lips and her skin.  From her heart she was still calling out warnings to her loved ones, but no one could hear her heart.  The only sounds to be heard on the ship were the sounds of rattling bones.  She huddled under the table for what seemed like days, and then weeks.  The doctor stormed up and down the halls of the ship, opening and slamming doors, calling out her name.

     Now the child had a problem.  She knew she could not stay under that table forever if she were to be reunited with her family.  She longed for her family more than she feared the doctor, but she loved her own body as she loved the world.  So she did the only thing she could in these circumstances.  She divided herself into two.  In order to camouflage herself she took pieces of everything before her and stitched them into a cape.  She took a sliver of wood from the operating table, a scrap of curtain, a torn page from the ship’s log, silk from the dress of a wealthy passenger, a feather from a gull, a leather luggage tag, rope from the deck, drops of rain, salt from the ocean, sand, floor dust, star dust and her own breath, and she stitched and stitched and stitched these things to her self and made a Cloak of Everything in which to camouflage herself.  When she divided herself into two her knowing self stayed under the Cloak of Everything and she sent away the un-knowing self.  Her un-knowing self ran out of the room with arms stretched wide open, crying like a baby, for her family. 

Film Still - Ancestry Cloth Performance

     Now the man known as the doctor was no longer pretending to be a healer.  He had become so furious in his search for the child all of his pretenses had fallen away and he was indeed a terrifying butcher.  In his rage he grabbed the un-knowing girl and her surgery was the most brutal of all.  He administered no gas, nor anesthesia, and he did not sterilize his tools.  The pain of the butchery caused the girl on the operating table to pass out from shock and forget everything.  From under the table her knowing self could hear the sounds of her own surgery, and she pulled the cape over her head and covered her ears.  That was the last she ever heard of her other half, who left the ship as a skeleton and reunited with her family.  

     The girl in the cape stayed under the table, frozen with fear.  There she remained, for years and years, growing from child to adolescent to woman.  At night she ventured out from the doctor’s room and crept into the kitchen to eat what she could without arousing suspicion.  She climbed up the mast of the ship and watched the waves of the ocean and the light of the moon and she called for her other half with a howl that sounded, to the sailors and passengers, like a powerful and haunting ocean wind.  And every day, just before the dawn, she climbed back down and returned under the operating table where she huddled under the cape that camouflaged her and protected her ears from the screams and the cutting and the rattling of bones.  But the cape heard it all and became very very heavy.  The cape continued to stitch the world into itself and every sound and every sight became its memory.  And the cape kept its memory in safe keeping until the time would come for the knowing self to call from the ship’s mast and be heard by her un-knowing self.

Film Still - Ancestry Cloth Performance

     The girl who had reunited with her family and entered the New World had a parallel life that looked very different but felt very much the same.  She longed for love with a sense of fear and distance that troubled everyone around her.  She would look in the mirror at night and spit at her reflection.  She cut into her flesh in order to know it as real.  She ate the feasts around her and vomited them up.  She saw her life ending even as it had just begun.  She wondered why she was so drawn to dark hallways and locked doors, but went into them nonetheless.  She could see in the dark, but when she told of what she had seen she was told she was mistaken.  In her mistakenness she looked for love in the world.  But the world was also torn from itself, and as it passed before her it showed itself as nothing but fragments.  She reached for the torn fragments and collected them.  She began to stitch them together.  As she stitched, she felt a strange breeze across her face.  She heard the sound of the wailing of the sea, she heard choral harmonies and she saw spectrums of light dancing before her closed eyes.  So she stitched and stitched, with what seemed like madness, driven from the realm of the unknown, or the yet to be known, or the yet to be remembered.  The fragments of the world became a cape, and she stitched more and more fragments into the cape.  The X-ray of her broken finger, a mirage of a faraway land, computer cables, her great grandmothers dress.  Dust from the room, dust from the stars, her tears, the hair of a newborn baby and a photograph from another time.  Cells and molecules so small they entered through the eye of her needle.  Memories and dreams so illusive they entered the cape while she was sleeping.  All of the opportunities for healing entered the cape, whether she recognized them or not.  

Photo from Performance of Dissimilation, Puebla Mexico
Photo courtesy of Arquetopia

    One day the cape was finished. By this time the girl was a woman with children of her own.  A voice rose from the cape.  The voice calmly instructed the woman, “Enter Me.”   The woman put the cape over her head and it covered her body, and all fear disappeared.  At that moment all the longing was fulfilled, and not in the way all the separate fragments had told her it would be.  The love she had longed for not something outside of her, it was all she had ever been.  At that moment she saw herself in the mirror and knew the one looking back.  At that moment she embraced her own body and it laughed out loud and cried in relief.  At that moment all that had been was no longer as it had been, and all that could be was to be anew.  At that moment the ending became the beginning.  

Close up - Ancestry Cloth
Photo courtesy of Bloom Photography by Kara 

This is the beginning of the Initiation of Dissimilation, where the structures are taken down and released.  Some things will be kept, some things will be released and all things will be transformed in the process.  We are no longer captives to a story that is not our own, each of us has a story, and no one story is more or less than another.  Each one of us makes the fabric of the multiverse the rich and powerful fabric that it is, and it is unable able to exist with one story missing.

Reflecting on Art as it Reflects Us.

“Art is a mirror to nature.”  Shakespeare

House in the Woods 1989

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality

but a hammer with which to shape it.”  Bertolt Brecht

The Gulf Stream 1995

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”  Ernst Fischer

Watch Man 1997

“My art is the knife the tears through the surface of reality; 
then it becomes the needle and thread that stitches it back together.”   Dawn Patel

Ancestor Dress 2016   photo credit: bloomphotographybykara

Cartography of the Unseen World

I woke up this morning thinking two things.  

1. I really should start working on an artist’s statement for “I Am Usha.”

2. I am at an age where many people have reached the top of their field.

And then, as I so often like to do, I completely deconstructed both of those concepts until I was staring at scattered piles of  assumptions, ready to be reassembled into something that resonates with my frequencies.

Let’s start with number 2.  What an interesting phrase.  Is the field on a hill?  Or has the person who has reached the top, like Yertle the Turtle, merely piled the other less fortunate, less ambitious, and less opportunistic into a mountain onto which to climb?  The mere concept of a winner relies on the existence of a loser, or many losers.  The more losers, the higher the winner rises.  

Some people will tell you this is the way of the world.  Others will insist it is human nature.  And still others will look toward nature itself as a justification for the competition model of human behavior… law of the jungle, survival of the fittest.  One can look at world history and into nature to find a certain logic to this theory and stop looking further.  This is a narrow search, the place where many have chosen to remain, having found the answer they were seeking.   

Or… one can widen the search.  One can search for and discover the history and the anthropology and the systems that wait patiently, just outside of the mainstream.  There are answers that you will never find unless you ask more questions.  There are voices you can’t hear unless you get very very quiet.  You have to be listening for something you’ve never heard before, something which at first might sound like a hallucination, or look like a mirage.  The unfamiliar always enters this way, always finding a way in.  Let your senses adjust and stay with it.  This is how we widen the search.

I have spent my life wandering through fields.  I can often be found on the edges, where the well trodden paths mark the way, reminding me I’m not the only one wandering.  I look down and see the coyote track, the deer track and the evidence of a system in flux, always striking a balance.  I have wandered through many fields, some lush with life and some deadened with chemicals and overuse.  Some in dormancy and some in their prime.  Witnessing the nature of fields from the ground has taught me many things, things I never would have understood if I insisted on climbing to a pinnacle.  

“I Am Usha” is the Cartography of the Unseen World, always witnessed in fleeting glimpses, wandering low along the edges.  Every piece of art is created as a marker along a path, a path that runs parallel to the deer paths on the edges of the fields, in a world where the human eye does not adjust to the wavelengths of light.  One sees with the heart, discovering a new form of communication within the body that has been patiently waiting to be awoken.  When I am creating from this place, a direct line from my heart to my hand guides me.  With great trust and an even greater love for the process, I make art.  I leave my own prints in the soil of consciousness, not to rise or fall in the drama of the world, but to mark my path in this parallel place.  

“Usha” is no more than a name, my name in my Ancestors’ language.  It is simply “Dawn.”  A name for transition, for the darkest time at the moment before light.  In this strange moment of flux, one sees with the heart what the eyes cannot decipher.  After my own personal transition from grief and detachment to acceptance and forgiveness, I have the strength and confidence to claim my name.  I claim it as my own, if only to offer it as my gift, a Gift of a Map for the Travelers to Come. 

Video Stills from "Skeleton Tree Dance" Jan 2017

Break (it) Down

The Prophet             by Kahlil Gibran

And a woman spoke, saying Tell us of Pain.

And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over the fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen,

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseeen’

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

Mariposa 1994

Break (it) Down

I have been thinking about the tension of opposites.  Engaging with the world in a time of turmoil has flung me into the tension of opposites.  I am beginning to see how this experience, if not consciously broken down, leads to a breakdown.  The last time I experienced it I gave into the grief for a very long time.  This time I am stepping back from the world when needed, for self care and reflection.   Sometimes I have to get to the point of spinning my wheels (and flailing my arms) before I realize it is time to step back.  Painting has a great deal to do with stepping back, for my approach to creative work includes hours spent in meditation, gathering information, shifting and understanding.  The painting is only the tangible record of it.  Painting is the material world, the body of work.  The rest is spirit.  

Journey 1995

   

Love for the world creates a desire to enter the world.  That, and the realization that it is not possible to retreat from life.  It follows you and pulls you back.  The more “alone” you make yourself the more your senses adapt and hear the smallest heartbeat, the tiniest call.  You feel the pulse of the world as acutely as if you were standing in the center of it.  It has lead me to a very conscious decision to reconnect.  One could say I picked a fine time.  I know I am not the only one.  This love can be so easily transformed into grief with the day to day experience of witnessing the world we love.  My grief has turned into action, but that has thrown me into a world of activity that is also motivated by fear and anger.  The fear, grief and anger are all so related they end up on the same team.  My conditioned response is frustration, inarticulately communicated to friends and acquaintances… leading to more frustration, of course, and ultimately frustration with myself.   

Untitled 1995

Jung’s theory on the tension of opposites concludes if one stays in the discomfort of this tension a third thing arises.  A “quantum leap”  of thinking and being, ultimately of consciousness.  It cannot be predicted because it is new, born out of opposites.  Try to force it would be like trying to determine the personality and destiny of your unborn child.  Sometimes we have a “feeling” about these things, sometimes even visions.  But in these bodies, in this world, we still have to wait and see.  How can I remain with my love for the world and my grief without breaking in half.  It seems only with the qualities of joy and hope, which are not always my natural states.  For me joy and hope have to be worked at, earned through understanding.  It is not just an intellectual understanding, it is a whole body and spirit experience, my definition of faith.

Faith 1995

I go into the world and am pulled by the tensions.  I act and react, often in ways I regret, and then return to my inner world where I can quietly break it down.  This is a conscious act, brought about by the same conditions an emotional breakdown would be.  I am approaching it these days as “beating it [a breakdown] to the punch.”   Taken to the point of a breakdown, I am able to break down the opposites and see them more clearly.  In this understanding I find myself in a more open and honest state, where trust, not in a determinist future, but in the vast universe of the present, can grow.

Juggernaut 1995

I found these older paintings of mine to be surprisingly effective for illustrating the tension of opposites that I am so aware of today.  Something to revisit in my work this year....  Perhaps my paintings will see the third thing before my conscious mind can grasp it.

The Female Center

I sometimes hear voices.  I kept pretty quiet about that my entire life, because, well, I was afraid of being judged by minds that do not understand such things.  This has been a month of letting go of fears... so that one's gone too.

In the early morning hours I sometimes hear a voice, telling me one thing at a time, helping me understand. It's always been a fatherly voice, until yesterday.  Yesterday the voice was female. It told me to Enter. 

The words were "Put yourself inside of me."  (If you immediately thought about sex read the next paragraph.  If not, you can skip it.)

The sexuality of the phrase, while undeniable, could easily become a distraction from the larger lesson of the words.  Making female power centered on sex is a way of taking away female power, by limiting it to one dimension of human activity.  If we as a culture had a healthy relationship with feminine power, then the relationship between sexuality and all the other forces that drive us as humans would exist in harmony.

I reflected on the words I had heard, "Put yourself inside of me" until I finally decided to paint.

My first interpretation of the voice was that of the earth, the mother, the female.

Fire inside, fire in the center.  What to enter?  The Center.  It is in the entering that the understanding begins to unfold, through the feeling, through the energy, through the very act of entering.

We are at a time in history when we have so much to look back on and sift through.  Books and knowledge excite me, offering so many paths of thought and exploration for the mind.  But, in the end, I have to get out of my head for the clarity I need.  The clarity that is needed for peace comes from calling my ancestors and finding my center.  It comes from a place that cannot be defined with words.  

The knowing that comes from the mind and the knowing that comes from the heart's center do not need to be in competition.   Coexisting, they work together, for we are in the world, as well as the spirit, at this time.  This is the conflict I see around me, that of opposing poles.  How does one shift that magnetic push of opposition into an alignment?   By entering the center, where the forces no longer push or pull.  Rather than split the atom, enter it.

What my ancestors and spirit are telling me is to release fear.  This happens by facing fears, not suppressing them or pushing them away.  Looking at fear and then letting it go is the way through the anxiety of our time.  It leads to a centered calm.  Everything must change, in a profound and all encompassing way.  That change is happening, and in order to adjust to the change, a strong and centered female energy is needed.  And this is an energy that is misunderstood in a patriarchal world, where equality is often sought on male terms, and feminine power is still confined by those very terms. 

The imbalance has been focused on male, light, linear thought, hierarchy and force.  We are witnessing its final stages.   It cannot be tamed, let alone fought , with more of its own .  A receptive, dark, female energy encircles it and tames it, not with force but with unimaginable power.  This happens on every level of human activity, from the most intimate to the most public, through personal relationships to political struggles.  All we need to do is look to nature and spirit to bring our human world back into balance.  Starting with, but not stopping at, ourselves.

Female is reception.  It is Yin.  It is the stillness in the center of the storm.   It is the heat from the center of the earth.  

That is where I enter.