Lip of the Volcano

Lip of the Volcano, 8" x 10", 20.4cm x 55cm, coloured India inks, watercolour pencils (all Faber-Castelli), 2010.

This image first appeared last year, in a version with a Photoshop filter, with a poem (that I still like): Autumn, and 'Shortest Route Between Two Dots Is A Circle.'

It's an Autumn image. The flaming edge. Balanced on fire. While waiting for my ailing iMac to open webpages I began dipping pencils from my new set of Faber-Castelli watercolour pencils into a small jar of water.

I had been thinking of Malcolm Lowry; I had been browsing German Expressionist painting, but looking for Italian Neo-Expressionists since I'm on a Michaelangelo Antonioni kick and was convinced there had to be connections, especially in the explosion scene in Zabriskie Point.



                                          

A few Autumn images...

They look like small twigs branching off from sticks, not witch's fingers. Nor do they resemble black lace or a tangle of neuronal nerves. They are not like veins of capillaries though obviously part of the same evolutionary design. They teach us cadence, grace and survival.

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Who could ever tire of the wind in the trees?
The wind blows leaves off the trees that are not already bare.

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A day of snapping of inner winds, turbulences, furies,
but all subtly, hidden.

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Glum takes hold, and I shake it off like dead leaves falling from trees.
Seedpods, broken leaf veins, dried stalks.



                                          

Stills

I prefer the upper one (it's faded out with the opacity option but on a black background which is why it's not shining in this still as it might), and that's the one I'll be using in the relevant section in my video talk. With photos arrayed around me, and drawings, and paintings, as well as digitally drawn images (like the one above), I realize the possibilities for adding art to the video are endless and that it's going to take me a lot longer than originally thought. This image alone of took hours - and I haven't figured out how I'll use it in the video yet. Motion key frame to expand and vaporize it? The image needs to be luminous - is it luminous enough?

                                          

How Can We Be Different and the Same?

direct link to video at Vimeo: How Can We Be Different and the Same?

A talk on the maternal body and sexual difference that I recorded in 2004 in Vancouver, and gave at an ARM conference at York University in Toronto in 2006. Recently I found the footage, and began playing with it in Final Cut, adding a number of filters. I am still working on the video, and will add scrolling images over the next week or so.

While I received a true 'dissing' when I presented this paper - a high level feminist maternal theorist arrived about half way through with her husband and spared no words in dismissing my work - and I never finished the degree I had intended to get for this work, I still stand behind every word. This was my last academic paper.

I was criticized for being 'essentialist' - such a, to my mind, pointless North American label whenever anyone tries to openly discuss the difficult and complex issues around the maternal body and motherhood and sexual difference. All I could respond with was that I had chosen to speak of 'an Adam and Eve' because you have to say something, offer an opinion on the reality, its difficulties.

Although I received apologies from the later-comer to my talk, I felt my position really too radical for even an organization focusing on research on motherhood.

So I will embed this on my 'birthdance' page at my website, where my work on the maternal body is.

Many thanks for reading this, and perhaps even watching.