PRINTSFrom Carolyn: I have been painting female energy for over twenty years, life-size (and sometimes larger) archetypal and mythological images of spirit women that encompass the landscape in human form. I started painting them in a chaotic frenzy one night when my son was very small and have not stopped, although the pace has slowed and these days the journey with them is more measured. They always come in cycles and circles; I know before I begin how many are making their way into the studio but not who will turn up. Each cycle usually takes several years to incubate (often as an undercurrent beneath the previous painting cycle) and two or three more years to be fully formed upon the board. Fibre and textiles, woven cloth in its many manifestations, have been intrinsic to this process. Essentially these women step out from the house of weavers, from where I have sourced so much of my work, their ancient shawls and ragged scraps of blanket billowing around them. I paint life-size or more because they seem far too wild and huge-of-spirit to be squeezed into smaller shapes. Often they are singing as they come; the first album I recorded in 1992 came from songs that I was listening to as I painted. They always carry stories, described in the many symbols and totems that are worn upon their forms. I make most of the items that they carry and these contribute to the installations that I create (two or three times for each cycle of work), devised as sacred shrines into which the inquisitive traveller may step and linger, contemplate and journey, perhaps participate in a night vigil or ceremony. My new cycle of paintings began during last winter and will unroll slowly over the next few years. They are named the Shaman-Weavers, at the moment there are thirteen waiting along the horizon and as each one is completed she will appear upon this page. They sit at the heart of the new programme of workshop journeys that I will be sharing with women from November 2011 through to 2014. “We are all landscapes. The landscape that we are shifts and evolves to match the landscape with which we have wrapped our lives. But sometimes it never really fits. We yearn to become a different landscape, one that has always in our quiet imaginings felt like home. And if ever we are blessed to actually see this land from which our own secret landscape was once torn, then something in us feels returned, complete. At last we know there is a place where we belong. This wild moor has always shaped my inner landscape. She is never ordinary. There is too much weather here to allow for complacency and she urges us to remain attentive. For all her bleak emptiness the moor is quietly busy. She creates and so inevitably must I. She sings and I leap up to catch the song. She projects herself into form and I work to reflect that with a frenzy. This land is a fine skin with a myriad of memories laid below. I can see the shadows of another time playing across the surface of the land; occasionally this is startling but mostly I am glad to be among familiar ghosts. This remembered landscape is the place of my return. And the further I wander into the centre of the moor, the closer I get to the edge of something else. I am driven to seek this edge and to discover what lies beyond. When the painting is complete, what is happening in the space beyond its boundaries? Every landscape carries a mythology, which is really many memories woven into a lasting cloth. Mythology is perhaps our deepest expression of the mystery and divinity of the land. A myth is an ancient story that embodies spirit; it is a long-held secret and a holy sacrament. A myth is a vessel in which we may hold safe the hidden grains of something huge and real, something deeply important to us and to our understanding of life. What we truly believe to be our truth will take form within our sacred stories. But we need to trust our stories, and believe in the landscape deep inside us that gives birth to them. We depend on ancient stories to describe for us the way we feel about the earth. Through these tales we open ourselves up to powerful teachings from the wild land, and from the memories that are caught and grown there. We create people to live out these myths, to represent for us the yearning and awe, the love and fear, the confusion and empowerment that we encounter in our relationship with a sacred earth. In this way great mythologies are born and made real, and no less is true of the landscape of our souls. We each remember, rediscover, recognise and bind together our own mythology; a story that explains and anchors our spirit land. We look for a hook on which to hand our tale, a pattern, a rhythm, a map of symbols. We search for tracks to take us far into our hidden country. We watch anxiously when we see the story blown about on a demanding wind or drenched by fierce rains. We worry that the track may end before we get there; that it will betray us; that if we reach the source, it will fall far short of what we had hoped for. That it will eventually be no more than a small fable, weak music sung with a pale note rather than a rich chord; a thin half-truth and not the all-encompassing everything of our imagination. In these ancient lands, our shrines are the forest floor, the open hill and the gentle valleys. Our church is the river and our temple is the sky. Our own bodies are the altars on which we lay our offerings and prayers. Our rituals are spontaneous and direct; they are raw communications with the sacred landscape and their simplicity serves us well. On these wild moors I finally came to understand the spirit of sacred land.” (from
Sacred House: Where Women Weave Words into the Earth) Please click on the image to view each collection of prints.
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