Bringing the Tree into the Gallery

At my Final Exhibition I wanted to created an installation within the gallery and represent the site specific trees that I had created art around. To form a web of connection between the interior world and the exterior.

The spice and pigment Mandala that I created was over three feet in diameter. I used the same materials that I use in my site specific work. At the show my greatest nightmare was that someone would walk through this work. I had visions of it as my great friends and musician (Frogwater) for that evenings daughter was dying to plough through it. The opening was a blur...I do remember going to show one of my artist friends Nicole Chan the work and gasped as I approached the destroyed Mandala. An old man fest up to it and said he had walked through it. What a test...what a night to let go and to embrace the impermanence of it all. This work even in the natural world is really about impermanence, just like Tibetan sand paintings. It is gentle revaluation of the truth of our transitory existence.

The destruction of this piece gave me an opportunity to create a ritual piece for our ancestors. The time was Halloween or Samhien and perfect. I went in the next day and resurrected this work. With red puja powder from India and peacock feathers. I made a call for fellow artists to bring rocks to honor their ancestors and to place them around the activated shrine. To create a circle of stones surrounding the interior..


To be continued.. more to tell on this work
Still to this day it is a mystery who destroyed my shrine, my art... for some reason I do not think it was the old man who did it...Although tramutic it really made the piece more powerful