Category Archives: Art metaphor

Suddenly, in a great tidal-flow of synchronicity, I was finding the Cumaean Sibyl, the ancient prophetess everywhere so what is it that the she represents and reminds us of in these times; right where are now in so called “history” on the brink of remembering there is also a thing called “herstory”? Is she that very story…the story of the sacred feminine, the wisdom of the lost female aspect that, with each passing year, was mislaid just a little bit more…burned, droned out and shouted down again and again until she remained only tenuously as a hearsay, word-of-mouth, Chinese whispered thing, like a little voice trapped in a jar?

Is this what Shelley, Plath and Wolfe and others like all of us who realise we carry this shared female experience in our cells have been feeling ever more defeated by, especially last century when the feminine seemed all but doomed (and had nothing to do with burning bras)? Did she feel so done, then, that all she had the strength to long for now was to anaesthetise the pain with prescription medications, or by succumbing to an unconscious lifestyle of endless consumption and distraction to numb her senses, or to snuff herself out altogether, “to die” as Elliot said. Is that the state of hopelessness that Shelley predicted in “The Last Man” and why”The Wasteland” must have felt like the beginning of the fulfilment of that dire prophesy a hundred years ago? Have we just witnessed our “darkest before the dawn” moment and are we now stepping out the other side of that, into the unfiltered light of a glass-less panorama? Had I just scraped the soil off the root of my long-time preoccupation with glass houses and views through windows, the one-time focus of my painting that no longer inspires me. Have we just gone “direct”, like the solar-return celebration of our civilization, with no more place for misted or distorted panes of glass, no desire or call for an intermediary in any shape or form on our route to clearly seeing our highest selves?

So what has changed, how are we in any different place now, what feels better and how are we re-writing that ending in the midst of an about face turn that changes absolutely everything? I don’t know it in so many concrete terms that I can put into words but I feel it as distinctly as it is possible to feel anything. In myself, I see how I have realised the new ending in the many thoughts that rose up in me, first, about being “kept under glass” and then knowing I was now “released” from that same glass. Like paint doubs on a canvas, I have felt myself fragment and reconfigure entirely and confinement is no longer part of that picture. Its a quantum change yet it is very very real and I feel it for all women. Continue reading →