Artist’s Statement
The words like jewels always available to us, ready to be strung into a necklace, woven into a tapestry, embedded into mosaics, or set into a ring: I've spent half a lifetime collecting jewels, searching for them, underground in dark humid caves, burning with the heat of the earth's mantle, or on the ice rimmed summits, where avalanches expose the sudden veins of quartz and metal, white and gold in the sunlight.
And I've spent the other half learning arrangement, how to create the facets, to grind and polish their surfaces, how to set each into the design so they dance together, motionless. The forms move endlessly as you turn them in your hands. After a while, it's hard to look away. It's like staring into a fire, watching a waterfall, observing the patterns of birds as they turn in circles above an autumn lake, preparing to land.
But the subject is never birds. Not fire or water or sapphires. Only love and song and the warmth of her skin. She sings in living. She sings because she's alive. Yes, the drops of water fall off her skin like diamonds in the afternoon light, she becomes the sea even as she emerges from it, as she moves between the worlds. She dances along the unmeasured shoreline, or walks across a tiled plaza. And if I'm close enough, I can travel with her.
The experience is overwhelming, transformative. Afterwards, I'm like a shattered mirror, scattering light, which must be glued back together, reconstructed. I can only reflect her figure. Her image is draped with the necklaces I've made, the jewel toned scarves I've gathered along the way, the rings I still offer. But there's something deeper within her, all these faceted surfaces are only hints of what she contains. Or perhaps it's not inside her at all, but present through her, and all around her, perhaps she is the universe, all that exists.
And a description of her is a record of my travels within her presence. Each poem changes into a kind of map any reader can follow: here I turned south. In this place, I awoke. They become a guidebook, an atlas you can open, filled with small reminders: a feather pressed between two leaves, a photograph that falls out as the pages are turned. Or they combine to form a chaplet, linked beads to be counted as you whisper with me one of her thousand names. Reading them is the only way to keep track, to keep from losing yourself. Let go, and read.
