I made my first animation! — GIF version of cover art I designed for my crew Ungus Ungus Ungus’ new album release, Constellations. Bonus: my vocals/lyrics appear on tracks 2 and 5.
Listen here: https://ungusungusungus.bandcamp.com/
Coming soon: an in-person workshop (Melb)
For now, a poem:
Art is forever making itself, piercing the fabric of the world
like an embroidery needle and looping back up,
threads of life following.
Let these lines - permutations of vibrating matter
- be gold boughs laden with darkly beaded pomegranates.
—NS
The green ones have come from the other world, tipsy like the breeze up to some foolishness…
—Rumi
As I was assembling this seasonal altar in the forest yesterday, I had a strong flash of body memory from when I was a kid. I had a book about a little girl who made furniture for faeries… I don’t really remember what the story was, but I remember the bodied feeling of enchantment specific to that story. Now there’s a whole new story to be stitched together from the gossamer threads of this breezy forest interlude. In the mix is a seam linking old Irish faerie lore and Rumi’s mention of ‘the other world’.
“Play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way.”
// Bogost, 2016 in Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
Photo taken by a friend at pre-2020 house party; glamour conjured in collabs with the hosts’ dress-up closet
“Inhabited space transcends geometric space” //Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 1958.
The virtual space, while geometrically awkward for the body, is inhabited.
These are some of my self-reflective notebook pages from Creative Resilience, an online studio I’ve been co-facilitating in recent months in partnership with McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery >>
Triad
Seed (Fire)
//Return to soil
//Seeds of pomegranate
//If you know, you know…
A spell for the sensuous*
*A nod to The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1996). Good shit.
Speaking of good shit, this one’s a quick drop for the soil-lovers, the seed grinders, and those turned on by a fertile planet.
When was the last time you lay down outside, belly to the earth? Give it a go; inconvenience yourself if need be.
Fuck any and all norms that say grown humans should not lie on the ground outside, hip bones to the dirt, physically sensing the strength of gravity holding our bodies in a life-death embrace with this planet, its pulse circling through our soft animal hearts.
From inside this embrace, we are impossibly tiny yet perfectly formed. We are also giants, sky-high shadowers of beings that are smaller still: a ladybug on a clover leaf, the colouring of a rock, a miniature forest of ground cover, the multi-organismic creature that is living soil.
This vantage point is powerful in generating a sense of immediacy. For whatever reason, it allows us to temporarily override the forces of language. Perhaps the action of lying belly-down triggers deep, formless rememberings of infancy, of the time before we had language to process our sensing.
Or maybe it lights up the most ancient structures of our brains, remnants of our reptile ancestry that have stayed on for the ride. In a very real way, elements of these ancestors are built into us even as we speed into our next iteration. In the same fashion, our primeval ancestors carried stamps of a time when our being was materially undifferentiated from the earth, even from the very fabric of space - a time when the synthesis of elements making up organic life was a seed yet to germinate.
Or it could be simply that lying belly-down outdoors is, for many of us, an unusual thing to do, thereby opening up novel sensory landscapes and a fresh perceptual lens.
Enough talk. Why not give it a whirl? Try doing it for at least 5 minutes each day for a week, and see what happens.
Winter solstice + moon time = 13-point constellation of the pelvic bowl and its generative candlelight.
Original artwork by NS
“The potentials of art to serve as an embodiment of significant experience, a symbol of transformation, a process of making special, a vehicle for gaining a sense of mastery, and/or an object of personal significance and import are all diminished when the art product is treated solely as a piece of evidence to be examined.”
Catherine Moon, ‘Studio Art Therapy: Cultivating the artist identity in the art therapist’, p. 245
Riffing on my current travels towards becoming a therapist, and identifying ways to strengthen and refine my identity as artist and alchemist in the process.
Stakeholder mapping can be a form of spellcasting… right?
Poem
I need these words to take flight and land.
Please, leave a gap in the canopy for the waves
that spin me through the rock of material time,
that let me be where I am not /what
I am not. Let lines and sounds - manipulations
of light and vibration - be limbs and leaves
that touch-reach-invite returning to the roots.
Waste nothing; transmute the fallen parts.
Hear my conviction that I am another you.
—NS
To approach the other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.
- Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity p. 51
Anestrus: the period of sexual dormancy between two periods of sexual activity in cyclically breeding mammals. Original design by NS.
I have been working with a concept of spellcasting by visualising, drawing, visualising and drawing again. This one’s stated purpose is ‘powering down to power up’, or accessing self-sourced fire through down-regulation.
Poem:
When I hear a raven in the fig tree
Declaring that the figs are not ripe,
I know the figs are nearly ripe
And that I won’t get to eat any.
—NS
E Q U I N O X - equal/night. At this time, the length of the day and the length of the night are roughly equal, in both of the Earth's hemispheres (unlike at the solstices, which mark the polarities of longest day/shortest night and shortest day/longest night). I'm increasingly of the belief that closeness with the cyclic time marked by these types of events is important for health. I've noticed that my own particular touchy health points tend to flare up when circumstances suck into the idea that time is only linear, and it makes sense to me because body is so inherently rhythmic. May you be merry in the space between as we lean towards winter.
//rose portrait by NS
Remixed original drawing by NS:
4x haiku
Bare wires touching
makes for unpredictable
(hot) consequences.
There are workarounds:
insulation breaks down flow
blown out of control.
Magnetism’s nice;
I’d rather it not blow out.
My heart’s inside this.
The perfect circuit
may be one that’s incomplete -
more like a spiral.
—NS
Objects of desire does not cut it, what this red rock of time can buy
the one blessed to bear it, momentarily sun-king for love and forever
held in the flame of reclaiming that burns away all but divine knights.
— NS
Heavy elemental magic; bone on rock. A poem:
…
The poetry of my body is written in the metre of space between.
It follows not the clean or ragged rhythms of outward extension
but erupts from a volcanic groan always churning in deep matter,
placing new threads that link points in secret knots,
finely worked on the loom of many hidden miracles.
The captive pulse of desire is my seat of being;
the emergency of that, a masterclass in my craft.
Patterns appear with the photonic cry of an Icelandic winter
- raw material, deep mater
on a rock polarised like Earth’s wet mind when they I say,
offhand, that I learned to come by listening to Homogenic.
-NS
No edit; no filter. Just the perfection held effortlessly within the chaos.
Alan Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety —
“Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculably ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.”
Destruction lies within creation, and creation within destruction: a key lesson of garden stewardship, and one of the many wisdoms of Hecate/Hekate. These violet flowers will become a nourishing breast oil, the bodies of the plants a contribution to the compost heap, and their former position a new spring bed. There is both sweetness and brutality in the act of uprooting, a dance of life and death and life again.
Integrate Rather Than Segregate
“Our cultural bias toward focus on the complexity of details tends to ignore the complexity of relationships. We tend to opt for segregation of elements as a default design strategy for reducing relationship complexity.” —David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
“Art ought to be a basic daily undertaking carried out by everyone for passing from nature to culture, from the satisfaction of instincts to the sharing of desire, that is, for preserving and cultivating the between-us.” — Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning She Was