‘Work from the Caldera’ 2007-08

A little fire tossed in…

‘Work from the Caldera’ was an interesting body of work for me, completed over 2007-2008, it directly leads into ‘Remnants & Remains’.  I’m still working this one out, so think of these images as experimentations, some work better than others.  That’s the process of being an artist, try a little bit of this and little of that, and grow from that. Let me know what you think, maybe these will come around sometime.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“We are one of the earth, yet we have spent millennial in furthering technologies to defy our own modest terrestrial roots.  However, we are not all that far removed from her, for she is our most natural ancestor.  Thus, our paths are forever tied together, with little regard towards our vain attempts to separate and isolate ourselves from her greater environment

Few features of the earth offer us a greater glimpse of her strength and defiance than her volcanic activates, and the greatest of those take the form of Calderas.  These mega-volcanoes inhabit our landscapes and form such areas of beauty as to draw us back near; their intrinsic properties serve as a beacon of insight.  Once we traveled great distances away from its devastation, now we often find ourselves in search of its source, in search of greater answers to our own beginnings. Like all true answers, these calderas are not readily searchable. Located far beneath any inhabitable surface, their vastness is great, and their own destruction is without doubt. Now under every known living-being since, lies the constant of heat, pressure, and a sheer force greater than anything or anyone.

This great fire from within the folds of our living earth shapes the ground which lies beneath our feet.  Journeys that those feet embark upon cross over the remnants of an event greater than our own visions of creation.  We often look-over our own earthly pasts, forgetting we escaped eons ago from such earthly fires with insignificant mortal forms not as much human as we are now.  The earth is much more than we often realize, an all encompassing furnace which is not nearly as quiet nor as restful as our own mortal sense of time approximates, but is much more alive and active than not.

This living rock in which we derive the life in which we lead is fragile indeed.  Its permanence is never doubted, its path almost near constant, ever unchanging.  Its foundation is never in question, for the earth has always been there, right and trusty, at least to those who spend only mere moments upon her surface.  We must look beneath for a glimpse of who we are, and where we have come from, and at this juncture of the human experience our own fears and desires can come forward.  We fear the unknown that is the dark, and inherently the earth comprises much of that spectrum.  We desire the ability to seemingly live forever, and again the earth holds that promise as well.  What we fail to often appreciate is how the earth itself is always changing, through birth and life, death and decay.

All of mortal life is a journey, and all of life is inevitable, a paradox not so unlike our own terrestrial earth.  Buddha’s last words on this earth may best capture our peril; ‘All created things must pass, strive on diligently’”