New Artwork

This artwork is partly about water, how going to the river in lockdown healed me. I’ve called it various titles so far – what the river said, we are the garden, healing as justice…Water seems incredible to me, a pattern around us to follow. I believe in spiritual things, in a creator. So then water seems to be a pattern to model our own inner path with. I just keep grasping at moments of inspiration and they all involve water. When the baby turtle swam by as I cried over past stories. It taught me to swim so trustingly, slowly and smile. The ocean walks when the gravity of the moon teaches the waves where to walk. The joy of walking in a storm up mountains and reaching the top. Poetry of clouds and rain. Then it is so devastating, floods and tidal waves, hurricane waters. So much power in the collective force of water.

It is the only naturally occurring example of something that can be solid, liquid and gas. It has minute trace elements that strengthen and assist genetics and life around us. Not compressible, and it dissolves many things, a bit like love maybe? It can in large quantities carve out whole new landscapes. Combined with wind creates a pattern of mountains in the sand just as the rocks on the highest surface. That meandering linear water pattern repeats itself randomly but in the same ways. Sand mountains and great rocky valleys and peaks moulded by water and wind.

We think we walk and drive on paths we created, yet many of our main pathways were originally carved by water. The shortest route to the sea. I like thinking about things that humble us. One of my lockdown bush walks went off the path and down a steep gully. It was challenging to find the river bed without falling! On the way back I chose to walk toward the largest trees one by one, discovering they marked the shortest route to the river and out again. The path that water makes has grown larger trees.

For me being part of the great carving that water does helps me understand how flexible I could learn to be too. How I am mostly water, even breathe in evaporated waters, bath in it, drink, swim in the ocean. It surrounds my every moment. This seems like a creators way, to care for the minute and the huge all in one way, the way of water. Indigenous thinking changes how I see my science and literature defined world. Changes the view into one of great forces that pattern themselves, linked in ways you can see if you look.

Boats of all kinds still are the major source of our economies movements. So I find myself travelling across history, the boats drew our divisive maps and brought all kinds of goods, people, events. Just from walking by waters or drinking it. That a drop of water is its own and yet so powerful with many others seems important. That we are cared for by water but ought to hold it in high respect. For me reflecting on water helps me expand briefly into understanding spiritual things. Then as usual I go home and make tea! After a drink of cold water.