direct link to YouTube: birthdance
In honour of Mother's Day. Paintings and poem may be found at my website: BIRTHDANCE
On the paintings:
THE BODY IS FOR BLOSSOMING
...pigment of flesh flowing under my fingers, magenta, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cyan green, cadmium yellow, dark violet, colour so rich it's almost edible, bodyscapes of colour, landscapes of fertility, erupting in the swirl of water and paint...
When I was pregnant, my body changed in fundamental and drastic ways. It was a crisis: the freedom of an old self was dying to make way for the mother I would become.
The "Birth Series" paintings became a visual journey of my changing body, a way to comprehend what I was undergoing in the tumble of hormones as my belly grew. The paintings focus on the woman who conceives and carries a baby into life, who nourishes and awaits the child who will hopefully emerge from the nine-month gestation of her body like a dream become real.
In reaction to an increasing invisibility in the world: the averted gaze, perhaps arising out of a cultural discomfort with the swollen belly, I wished to present the pregnant body as sensual and sacred. Despite my desire to confound the categories of alluring woman and maternal body, I found myself deep in the mystery of creation itself.
At the beginning of the series, the body is portrayed clearly; as the forces of labour, birth and then breastfeeding unfold, the clarity shifts into flowing colours suggesting the transformative experience that carrying and delivering and breastfeeding a baby is.
These paintings are about a rite of passage, about the strangest body on earth, about the mind-blowing transformation of skin, belly, heart and perception of the self, as a woman ripens and delivers her fragile and beautiful fruit, the newborn, a miracle of the world.
On the poem:
BIRTHDANCE took two years to write. In 1987, after my first child, my son, was born, I tried to write about birth. At the time, I was unable to find any poetry or literature by women on what giving birth 'felt' like, on their inner birthing experience, and I wasn't sure how to express those powerful birthing hours. It took some years, and many revisions as I worked towards how to express this powerful moment of my life, and finally chose to allow the stages of labour to structure the poem. Each woman has a different experience of birth, the many stories, poems and artwork by women in the last decade or two have been an important sharing of what was previously hidden.
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The Birth Paintings and BIRTHDANCE were painted and composed from 1986-1989.
i somehow missed the part about this taking you two years to write... bravo for that endeavor. i hope when i start my book of poems, i have that kind of staying power, bren... "i have staying power/ like Oregon rains..." xoxoxoxo
ReplyDeletev word: toloharo. i love the randomness of blogger's nonsense words. they always make some kind of ridiculous sense to me... i want to bring them into being. :>>))
I had to hide it from my husband... he was competitive as a writer and got very jealous when I later received attention for this work (at an art show along with one of my paintings, actually the one YouTube chose as a still for the video, a packed poetry reading where I was videotaped - and he wouldn't let me take the videographer up on her request to video me reading it in a studio setting, and on the radio -a Mother's Day invitation he actually forbade me to accept! yes, I went anyway to that one). For 2 years I wasn't able to show him a word! He would have shredded it and I probably would have thrown it out, I was trying so hard 'to please,' 'to be accepted.' It's a nightmare to think of now, being in a place like that with another human being - but perhaps men, who cannot give birth, have traditionally done this to this aspect of women's experience? I mean over the centuries, not the contemporary man. The men raised by feminist mothers, who are much more democratic, much more supportive, and much more generous in their acceptance of women's experience.
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